7 OFFICE BRANDING TIPS

1. APPROACHING THE OFFICE

A lot of effort goes into the homepage of your website, so why not do the same for the outside of your office? Depending on the location of your office you’ll have different considerations… located on a business park? Well, then invariably your customers, staff, and supplier will get their first glimpse of your brand from the car park. Small things such as signage for visitors parking should all be thought about. If you’re in a city centre, large colourful external graphics are typically used for B2C customers, but for B2B, our clients often choose to hide behind huge tinted glass walls with little or no obvious branding.

2. RECEPTION AREA

This leads us, whether in the city or on the business park into the most important office branding room of all… the reception area. The only area that you can guarantee that everyone will visit, and often, spend quite some time there waiting for their meeting with you to start.

On the walls, you could create a beautiful graphical timeline, which picks up on the highlights of the company since inception, or maybe enrich the area with an original piece of artwork that has some relevance to either the origins or the future direction of the company. Either way, the reception area of your office building should be good enough to sustain the interest of your dream employee whilst they wait fifteen minutes for their job interview.

3. STAIRWAYS

Although the amount of time people spend in these areas is minimal, you don’t want them to feel an instant come down from the splendour of your reception area. This is why it’s worth putting at least some consideration, or continuous graphic into this area. Signage is often required here, and so combining that with your graphic is a double win. One popular, and effective method is to place the larger than life floor level indicators on the stairwells.

4. CORRIDORS

Consider the corridors as the veins of the building, pumping people from room to room, offering them a few moments of respite between engagements. They offer a great opportunity to increase the mental wellness of your staff.

A few years ago, the Science Museum did an experiment in one of their wide corridors. Along one side they placed full colour photographs of young people doing sport, whereas, on the other side, they placed black and white portraits of older people. They noticed that visitors walked slower on the second side, taking time to look at the faces in detail. So think about how you want to influence your team, do you want to speed them up or slow them down?

5. MEETING ROOMS

Meeting rooms have changed over the years, from the head of the table speaking one-way to the assembled crowd, to circular tables, and now on to a technological feast of screens, smartphones, and PowerPoints. As no meeting is the same, the branding in this area needs to be a little more flexible, some options include a relaxing landscape image that in some way relates to work, abstract art, or maybe some punchy inspirational quotes.

6. OPEN PLAN OFFICES

Nowadays most offices are of the open plan variety, to encourage collaboration and relationship building within your team. So to brand this area should be done in such a way that enhances the overall aims of the office. Proportionally, your visitors are going to spend a fraction of the time in this area compared to your staff, so their needs shouldn’t really come first. Office branding of the open-plan area can be contentious, to say the least, so here are some methodologies to choose from.

Option 1: Seek staff engagement. This sounds good on the face of it, get everyone involved for the purpose of a common good, and they can be proud of what they see on the walls at the end of the day… every day. But there are some major obstacles to overcome, what if one of your staff fancy themselves as a bit of an interior designer, they put their heart and soul into the idea… and then you don’t choose it. You’re then left with a disgruntled member of staff, who probably already had issues with you, but now has a daily reminder (the other person’s design) up on the wall in front of them every day.

Option 2: Seek staff approval. Get your designer to come up with a few options and do a survey amongst the staff to see which design they prefer the most. As the concepts will have been professionally designed, and vetted by yourself before showing anyone, it’s a much safer route. The sacrifice is of course, that your staff won’t feel as involved as if they’d come up with the whole concept themselves.

Option 3: Just do it. One company we worked for took the view that if they asked anyone for approval, that they’d have to ask everyone… and if they did that the process would be never-ending. So they just told us to get on with it, install it over the weekend and they’d deal with the fallout on Monday morning (there was only one small objection, which we remedied soon after).

7. IN CONCLUSION

Put your effort into the reception area as that will gain the most exposure, think up imaginative methods to brand the lobbies, stairwells, and corridors. Then remember the actual purpose of your open-plan offices and meeting rooms and think about the best ways to aid people achieve these goals. Consider that office branding could be used in short term (1-3 years) so it could be project-based, but more often than not it focuses on the longer-term (3-10 years) so a design scheme based more on values and ethos could be the answer you are looking for.

A COUPLE OF PITFALLS TO AVOID

Pitfall 1: In our 10-years-experience in branding offices we’ve come to learn some things to avoid the hard way. Some years back, we put a great deal of effort coming up with 40 or so witty one-liners, which would be placed on the walls of a stairwell. Although our client approved the concepts, they fell by the wayside when their superior took a look. One person’s humour is another person’s insult, so it’s best to avoid it altogether.

Pitfall 2: Other things to consider are images of your staff blown up to 20ft on your walls. As wonderful as it may be whilst they are happily working for you, and even if you get them to sign a model release, it’s just not worth it if they fall out with you or even move on to a competitors firm, as then you’ll be stuck in the sticky situation of re-doing it all again.