Boston Consulting Group
One brand vision, a multitude of design expressions.
Boston Consulting Group is one of the world’s largest management consulting firms, with a tradition of deep thinking and a 50-year legacy of client impact. They came to us looking to transform their brand for the digital age, in order to better reflect the dynamic growth and diversification of their offering. Over the course of a five year relationship, we overhauled their entire visual landscape, including a new logo and identity system, a redesigned website, signature thought leadership microsites, custom artwork libraries, and a revamped employer brand.
Insights
BCG brings together the world’s leading thinkers and cutting-edge practitioners, but their existing brand didn’t reflect this reality. With over 90 offices in 50 countries, a complex brand architecture, a vast partnership structure, and a historically siloed approach to marketing, the organizational alignment would prove crucial to developing a holistic vision for the brand’s future.
Idea
Immediately we recognized the need for a unified but flexible approach to design. We led the creation of a set of brand principles as well as a design manifesto, developed through extensive internal interviews and rolled out in hands-on training workshops, all aimed at empowering BCG’s global creative studio leads to take ownership of the new brand vision.
Impact
Our engagement culminated in the creation of a new logo, establishing a simpler, bolder, and more connected icon for the brand that is digitally legible and globally recognizable. Placed at the center of a newly rationalized brand architecture and identity system, the mark firmly centers this expansive brand universe and reasserts BCG as an imaginative and iconic force for business.
Brand Identity
From logomark to recruiting to client events to web experience, our design transformation remade the entire look and feel of the brand in line with a robust new brand toolkit. Leveraging a diverse network of artistic voices, we launched a crowdsourced photography initiative in partnership with EyeEm, and developed a custom parametric art system that converts site data into visually arresting and unique artworks for each of BCG’s practice areas.
Website
The value [of parametric art] is two-fold: not only does it provide web content to distinguish the practice areas, but it provides a conversation starter for both clients and prospects that expresses what BCG is, and how deeply they think about things.
Fast Company
Through a streamlined navigational structure and a 68% reduction in site content—from 4,000 pages to 1,700 pages—we were able to increase traffic to critical pages and clarify calls to action, without sacrificing quality or depth of content. The result was a doubling of the time of engagement on site.
Brand Expression
By enhancing BCG’s signature thought leadership pieces with an integrated and curated user experience design, we designed experiences that captivated BCG’s core audiences. We created a unique system of typographic illustration transforming headlines into provocative visuals. We collaborated with typographers like Sarp Sözdinler, Craig Ward and André Beato. The results drove a nearly 4x increase in social traffic for the redesigned microsites
Talent Recruitment Materials
Talent recruitment is the lifeblood of BCG, and a key component of our work was to develop their employer brand strategy and bring it to life with a new recruiting campaign, titled “Build. Connect. Grow.” By expressing the depth and reward of a career at BCG using real employee voices paired with powerful custom artwork and live events, we were able to achieve an increase in applications, an increase in offers accepted, and a greater employee understanding of key messages.
Universal Design System
BCG’s prowess is a testament to its people. Consultants have entrepreneurially established many agile businesses within BCG creating centers and accelerators that create deep value for many of their practice areas and industries. We designed a naming and typographic system that unified these sub brands. We then collaborated with artists Ingrid Tsy, Luke Choice, and Joshua Davis creating a library of visuals that could be paired with each name. The result is bold system that aligns each entity while allowing them to have a unique visual language.
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