A refreshed brand means revisiting values

During a rebrand, it's critical to pay attention to the values a new brand communicates. Glenn Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer of the Houston Symphony talks about the values their centennial rebranding campaign reflects.

Robin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest again today is Glenn Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer at the Houston Symphony. Glenn, welcome back to Brandonomics.

Glenn: Thanks, Robin.

Robin: I’m excited you’re here. This is the year, of course, of the Houston Symphony rebrand, and I want to learn more about what your goals were behind the rebrand — kind of what did you set out to do?

Glenn: Yeah, well ultimately, Robin, it was about relevance and making the symphony even more relevant to more Houstonians. The symphony world, I think, is sort of wrought with some preconceived notions about what the experience is going to be like, so one of the values we really wanted to bring up was approachability. Make the brand more warm, relevant, approachable, something people could connect to. So we’ve actually outlined a four square of values that we wanted to bring out: so relevance, approachability, innovation is a really important one. The organization as a whole has that as one of our “lights” to continue to move towards.

Robin: How would someone see some of these values incorporated into the new brand itself?

Glenn: Yeah, so actually our previous mark was actually just a stylized text mark. It didn’t have – yeah, a personality beyond the letters, so we brought in an identity that had a mark and type that are integrated so that we could have some more flexibility to communicate more. And actually, we did some research prior to the rebranding and found out that, yes, we were communicating classiness and sophistication and that those were actually important things. We didn’t want to leave those behind, but what wasn’t there was passion, excitement. And so you’ll see in the visual representation of our brand in the mark some movement. Yes, there’s the classiness and sophistication there, but there’s passion, there’s color, there’s movement, there’s –

Robin: There’s energy.

Glenn: – energy, there’s something dynamic.

Robin: Okay, well, great. Well, thank you for giving us the inside behind that.

Glenn: Thank you. My pleasure.

Robin: Great. This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

The mission of the Houston Symphony is to inspire and to enrich the lives of Houston’s diverse citizenry through outstanding symphonic music performed by our great orchestra. For 100 years, The Houston Symphony has upheld this mission.

https://www.houstonsymphony.org/