Countermeasures Corp.
- A branding case study for Countermeasures Corp.
ABOUT PROJECT
Countermeasures Corp. was founded to provide solutions to beverage industry clients.
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The Brief
The Context:
The folks at Countermeasures Corp., a beverage industry solutions startup, wanted a logo redesign after their Canva self designed logo had outlived its usefulness. They wanted to look more professional, more beverage oriented, and they wanted something that works well digitally, socially, and on apparel.
The Push:
The beverage industry is one of the most competitive industries when it comes to design, packaging, and branding. Your product sits on a shelf by potentially hundreds of competitors. People have their beer, and you have to convince them to give you a chance with a single glance. As a beverage solutions partner, Countermeasures needs to prove their expertise in this industry with their branding, and show that they can do for you what they did for themselves. As a solutions partner their branding should also reflect that they are a solutions partner to the beverage industry, so in essence a need to balance the creative and analytical.
The Mission:
Craft branding that craft breweries would envy.
The Idea:
Treat this project as a brewery aimed at a more mature audience and build brand fans.
The Future:
“I want our branding to feel like Countermeasures” -beverage industry startup
Finding the right balance between the creative and analytical was the biggest challenge in this project for Troubador. The Countermeasures folks had provided logo references that they liked that were closer to the analytical side. Clean, geometric, and minimalist logos that you see commonly associated with marketing startups, but not with breweries. In the image you can see how this process evolved with us at first trying to be subtle about being a beverage industry partner, until we decided to smack you on the nose with beverage references. The process also evolved as we wanted to tell a bit more of a story with the logo.
We wanted to create brand fans with this logo, and we needed to start with the founders. The winning concept featured interlocking “C’s” that formed an “M” shape at the top. These interlocking “C’s” represent a scale balancing hops and grapes to tie back to the beverage industry. When trying to represent Countermeasures we often relied on words like strategy, tactics, precision in earlier revisions. The word measure can also mean the measure of a weight, and you can counter that measure with another measure to balance the scale.
Previously the Countermeasure team had used a color scheme that consisted of shades of olive and a light cream color. These colors are fine for a more marketing oriented color scheme, but we wanted to push them towards something bright, bold, and different to help them stand out as a Brewery would need to.
We provided ten options inspired by beverage industry branding projects that used color schemes that we at Troubador loved. From breweries, vineyards, to smoothie makers we wanted to find color schemes that would help a startup stand out on the metaphorical shelf. We wanted them to be able fun and versatile branding that they could do a lot of things with.
The folks at Countermeasures are the type where they want to see it, and know that you have exhausted every option. So we wanted to give them as many different color schemes within reason, so that they could see it and find what they were looking for.
They ended up opting for navy and teal that we associated with an Atlantic east coast brewery, colors that we don’t see used as often with the marketing startups that over this process they had decided to distance themselves from.
