City & Guilds Group
Pioneers in skills development
- Charities & Education
- Brand Strategy
- Brand Identity
Background
City & Guilds Group has been upskilling workforces for over 100 years. Founded in 1878, this skills development agency has been an influential force behind economic growth and development, helping people and organisations flourish. City and Guilds Group has grown, with a complex structure encompassing a number of sub-brands, and offering vocational training to over 2 million learners annually across 60 countries.
Brief
To define and articulate the Group’s current offer, with a clear brand strategy. To bring coherence to complexity, aligning all Group brands into one visually cohesive identity. To retain and celebrate the Group’s heritage, whilst positioning it as a contemporary international brand, relevant and appealing to a modern workforce and new audiences.
Solution
Working with multiple stakeholders in this complex organisation, SEA devised a clear way forward for the new group brand strategy. Our brand proposition centred around an organising thought – ‘Pioneers in Global Skills Development’ as the driver for all brand development decisions.
The group operates across multiple sectors with multiple business brands, each with their own individual identity. To unify these separate businesses, we created a single, clearly-defined Group brand identity, with a brand architecture framework flexible enough to accommodate existing brands and future acquisitions, within a strongly aligned visual identity.
The Group’s brand values of collaboration and cohesion are at the heart of the identity. Recognising the organisation’s rich and successful heritage, the ‘ampersand’ is made up of small graphic representations of the original shapes from the Guilds’ historic heraldic shields. The group brand identity is instantly recognisable, dynamic, and exciting, reflecting the organisation’s position as a modern, progressive provider of global education.
Our work also included the roll out of two of the Groups individual businesses, City & Guilds and Kineo.
To discover more about our work, drop us a line at seathinking@seadesign.com
