Today we’re celebrating the launch of a new, refreshed brand for the Climate Group.
As climate action becomes more urgent, there’s no better time for us to be making these changes. A new brand can help us help us more clearly communicate the breadth of work being undertaken by our partners in business and government. And by communicating with more urgency, we can help inspire others to do more.
Over the next few months you’ll see us roll out our new identity.
So what did we do?
Working with our branding partner, Human After All, we reviewed all of our communications work over the past few years to give us some insights into what we’ve been doing well, and what needs to change. We spoke to our staff and partners. We gathered insights from the external world and organisations that are similar to us.
In doing so, we saw we had some great ingredients to build on – a strong logo, colours, and an ambitious mission. But we also recognised there were a lot of inconsistencies in how we were presenting ourselves and our work. That posed a big risk to us – the lack of clarity meant that we could potentially be missing out on opportunities to collaborate or work with others further.
What have we changed?
Through this process we have identified several exciting changes that we think will really help us to address those challenges and uplift our work.
A refreshed mission statement: we’ve gone from ‘accelerating climate action’ to ‘driving climate action. Fast.’ It’s a subtle shift, but we’ve adopted more direct language to help get across the urgency needed to act. And we’ve clarified the language around who we are and what we do.
A new tone of voice: to help provide consistency in our writing and a common language for our growing global team. Key principles include using more active, direct language that feels more like a 1-2-1 conversation than academic prose. We’ve linked it all back to our key personality trait of being ‘driven’ – so with no time to lose, everything we write helps to move things forward.
Changing our logo: we’ve taken ‘The’ out of our logo for practical purposes. But we’re still the Climate Group.
Tweaking the logos of our initiatives: we’ve realised that we haven’t been clearly linking our world leading initiatives on renewables (RE100), electric vehicles, (EV100) and energy productivity (EP100) back to the Climate Group. This has been confusing for our audiences. And importantly, we recognised that there was a big opportunity that we were missing in telling the bigger story of how our partners across business and government – which include over 300 multinational and 200 state and regional governments – are collectively moving the dial on climate action across really important areas of work.
Brighter brand colours and refreshed typography: to help highlight that sense of urgency we want to achieve in our communications and wider work.
Our CEO, Helen Clarkson said: “We’re excited to be rolling out our new brand.
“How we communicate is central to our mission and theory of change. In the next ten years, the world needs to halve emissions. Now more than ever, we need to act with urgency. And we need smart, powerful communications that can inspire others to act.”
The team at Human After All added:
“After lots of detailed research and conversation around what the brand needed to achieve, we’re proud to have played a part in helping define the Climate Group’s bold, driven new direction. With its refreshed visual identity, new tone of voice and clear brand architecture, we believe the Climate Group has the brand it needs to achieve its newly defined mission: To drive climate action. Fast.”
What’s still to come?
We’re also undertaking an exciting project to develop a new website to help showcase our stories and impact much more powerfully. We are hoping this will be launched in early autumn.
