Folio Brickworks Branding

Brickworks is a public company and employs 1700 people across Australia and New Zealand.  Brickworks owns a number of household name brands with the best known being Austral Bricks. Over the past 10 years Brickworks has acquired a number of different businesses all based in the building manufacturing industry.  Their companies cover most of the building categories, these include: Austral Masonry, Austral Facades, Austral Precast, Bristile Roofing and Auswest Timbers. Within these categories they had a number of different businesses, like for instance Austral Precast had Sasso, Girotto and Gocrete. As part of the brand overhaul, the brand structure was simplified. With the three Precast businesses they would all become Austral Precast.

The objective of this branding language development was to create a consistent marketing style for all the brand categories, in essence we were creating one message and one visual voice for all the businesses.  Easier said than done, while creating a visual style flexible enough to work across all businesses and the different marketing mediums was always going to be challenge, we were confidant we were always going to succeed. 

But creating a consistent marketing style is only half the challenge, the more challenging hurdle was to get all these different businesses to change their culture, (change how they have always done things). This will always be a work in progress with large companies.

The projects steps followed these guidelines.

1. Sort out the company brand architecture.
2. Create a visual style that will work across all six companies.
3. Develop a detailed style guide for the new visual brand language.
4. Launch the brand language.
5. Manage the implementation of the new style across all forms of marketing media.

It has been nearly one year since the launch of  the new visual brand language. The new style has been received very well with an enthusiastic adoption.  The cultural change has been as expected a little slower, but with tiny steps we are climbing the mountain of change.