Joslin Rowe is one of the UK's leading professional recruitment agencies specialising in roles across the financial services sector, commerce and industry. Joslin Rowe has offices in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Joslin Rowe started talking to us in early 2007 about refreshing their web presence and online brand. In a competitive industry they realised the key to success would be to differentiate themselves with a highly usable web interface supported by an online and offline brand presence that marked them out from their competitors.

The brief

Create a new look and feel for an established city company in order to increase brand penetration and presence.

What we did

Joslin Rowe has been trading for over 20 years and has strong reputation amongst its peers, clients and candidates.

In light of this we were not trying to create a new brand, rather our challenge was to collate the company's brand aspirations and values, validate the brand values as they were being practised and articulate the brand in a new visual language and tone of voice. .

We needed to draw Joslin Rowe out of the brand space occupied by other recruitment companies to ensure they differentiated themselves from the homogonous clusters of recruitment brands. At the same time the brand needed to be true to the way Joslin Rowe are perceived.

To achieve this we undertook detailed interviews with Joslin Rowe clients, candidates and consultants to get unprompted feedback as to how it felt to interact with Joslin Rowe. This is a time consuming process but it gave us invaluable insight into how Joslin Rowe are viewed and how the brand values are manifest day to day.

When we analysed our findings we found that Joslin Rowe already had strong brand values which were being played out on a daily basis through interaction between Joslin Rowe and external or internal parties. However these values were not projected through the existing brand material.

With the values as a foundation we were able to build on the brand to create behaviours (how to act the brand) from which we developed the brand "tone of voice" which tells us a lot about the brand personality.

From here we handed the project to our visual designers who created the assets and visual language that create the visible brand. These assets, along with a stock of bespoke photography, have delivered Joslin Rowe a distinctive brand which will see them standing head and shoulders above their competitors for some time to come.

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