The challenge
Because starting and growing a creative agency isn’t easy, the CAS team offers clients mentorship and solutions to help their clients create the life they envisioned when they first started their agency. A life of time-freedom and higher profits. And the best part? If you ask any of their clients, they’ll say it works.
Unfortunately, no one outside of the CAS community knew this. With a team comprised of analytical, operational, and financial backgrounds and a target audience of creatives, CAS needed a new way to communicate and connect with prospective clients whilst staying true to their data-driven approach.
Therefore, our primary task as brand partner was to develop a brand which humanised the analytical approach CAS had created so that more people would opt-in for the program.
During our early research, we discovered that one of CAS’s greatest benefits, and simultaneously greatest challenges, was its founder, Robert Patin. Clients were drawn in by Robert’s status as a best-selling author with decades of agency experience. In fact, most clients only purchased the program after speaking with him directly.
As a result, Are & Be was tasked with expanding the brand to include CAS’s wider team, while also providing more clarity on the program’s unique benefits and making it enticing enough to buy ‘off the shelf’.
Research and insights gathering
Our first step in working with CAS was to research their current brand strategy.
CAS, after working with agencies both thriving and on the verge of bankruptcy, developed a unique, tailored approach to their solutions. This approach was clearly a key component in their success, as evidenced by the customer and team interviews, we conducted. Unfortunately, this was an unspoken asset prior to CAS’s collaboration with Are & Be.
They had created a one-of-a-kind support model that was more focused on the individual needs of clients and were unintentionally keeping its existence a secret.
Together, we decided to reveal the secret in a series of ideas that humanise agency owners’ struggles and superpowers; and one that doesn’t simply sell on the promise of a 7-8 figure salary.
Visual brand identity
We chose to position CAS as the yin to their client’s yang, the logic to their creativity, and the collective confidence to individual clarity. We developed a brand design based on the seven aspects of CAS’s agency accelerator program.
To demonstrate CAS’s data-driven approach, we created a radar chart with two parts: the agency and the programme and demonstrated how they work together symbiotically.
This identity was designed to be a flexible and abstract device that could be adapted to house imagery or used to supplement the data that CAS frequently employs.
Verbal brand identity
For CAS’s verbal identity, we opted to craft a TOV that was both methodical and empathetic – utilising terminology like ‘logical,’ ‘powerful’ and ‘tailored’, while introducing CAS as a supportive ‘scale partner’.
Despite the community that CAS had built, we felt there was a distinct lack of focus on their clients (a feature shared by many of their competitors)– so some of our copy directly utilised customer testimonials.
Logo development
The logo design for CAS focused on the idea of balancing the structured framework of the program with the fluidity of the agency owner’s creativity – an evolution of the yin and yang symbol, which has seven sides to allude to CAS’s agency accelerator.
Continued brand consultancy
Since our partnership, we have continued to provide CAS strategic brand consultancy and implementation stewardship for the team, helping them build out a brand for a program that supports hundreds of agency owners and the lives they aspire to achieve. Our set of brand guidelines and all the assets we created enable CAS to continue establishing a consistent brand presence/identity.
See how we've taken another client from are to be
Innovation House
