North East brand design and web agency Canny Creative has unveiled a new brand identity leaning hard into its belief in “having serious fun” and challenging the idea that professionalism has to mean playing it safe.
The refresh lands months after the agency marked its 10th anniversary as a limited company, and comes as the business makes a strategic shift towards B2B clients. Anchored by the strapline ‘Taming marketing monsters since 2015’, the new look is designed to reflect how the agency and its client base has evolved over the past decade.
“Canny has changed a lot over the last ten years,” Tony Hardy, Founder and Managing Director at Canny Creative, said. “Our thinking has evolved, along with our client base, and our brand identity just hadn’t kept pace. We wanted something that would reflect our evolution, without losing the fun, approachable side that people know us for.”
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He added: “What we also wanted was something genuinely new and a little bit disruptive. The creative sector is saturated with agencies promising to help their clients to ‘stand out from the crowd’, but then their own visual identities don’t practice what they’re preaching. We didn’t want to do that.
“We carried out a tonne of research and played around with lots of different concepts until we landed on something which felt authentic. It’s a bit outside of the box, but that’s exactly the point.”
The new identity features a pastel colour palette, bold Moret typography and hand-drawn illustrations, alongside a refreshed logo, a new website and the introduction of a brand mascot – Mark, the monster of marketing. The character is intended as a playful satire of modern marketing, while signalling that Canny is positioning itself for its next phase of growth.
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“Introducing a big, hairy purple monster into our branding was a calculated risk,” Hardy said. “Brand mascots have been around for years, but they’re almost never used in B2B. B2B branding is traditionally very safe and accessible, but instead of seeing that as a limitation, we saw an opportunity.”
He continued: “Because the truth is, marketing today is a bit of a monster. We work with clients all over the world, from big multinational corporations to owner managed businesses, and the one thing that all of the marketing teams have in common is that they’re stretched too thin… It’s a lot.
“Mark the monster is the embodiment of that spirit. He is a lot. He’s the unpredictable brilliance of the creative sector which, for all of its fun and playfulness, is absolutely vital to a businesses’ ongoing success.
“People will either love it or hate it, but we hope that they at least get it. It’s been a labour of love for our in-house team, and I’m really proud of how it’s turned out.”
Founded in 2015, Canny Creative provides brand design, website development and SEO services to B2B clients across sectors including IT and technology, recruitment and training, and healthcare.
