our workNICEIC / Branding the guardians of electrical safety
You may be surprised to learn that anyone can advertise themselves as an electrician – without any qualifications or accreditation. Professional certification, which includes regular assessments of electricians’ work, is currently voluntary. Unlike gas engineers who must be on the Gas Safe Register to legally carry out work, anyone can pick up a toolbox and say they’re an electrician. And that’s one of the challenges for NICEIC – the market leader for certification of electrotechnical and building professionals.
They wanted to refresh their brand and communicate the value, credibility, and safety that professional certification offers.
Their brief set out other requirements too: consolidating their status as the biggest, most respected industry player; further differentiating them from their competition; and reassuring tradespeople that being with NICEIC offers real credibility and commercial value.
From the fundamentals to the finer details
Our starting point was to work with their board to define the brand architecture, and we ran sessions to agree the content for a new brand house. We also consulted colleagues at different levels and spoke to NICEIC’s owner organisations: Electrical Safety First and the Electrical Contractors’ Association.
We used the new brand house as the platform for a major brand refresh, with new guidelines documents covering the visual identity, partner branding and tone of voice. An extra layer to this process was to review and refresh the identity of the parent organisation, Certsure, a certifications specialist.
A seriously professional brand
Our ambition was to make the revitalised NICEIC brand as exacting, confident, and easy to apply as the technical advice their professionals provide.
We applied this spirit to almost every brand element and touchpoint. The only component out of scope was the iconic brand logo based on the positive and negative electricity symbols – proudly displayed on thousands of tradespeople’s vans across Britain.
Structured and precise
Our new graphic approach introduced clarity and structure to make the messaging jump out and organise the levels of information within communications. We applied this to templates for many different media and channels – from brand, digital and social to signage and Office 365.
Credible, versatile photography
An important requirement was a bank of new photography that depicts NICIEC professionals at work in a way that’s accurate, compliant, and truly representative of today’s technology and workforce. We worked with the client to plan a highly technical shoot and completed it during the guidelines development, weaving the imagery into the finished document.
Video content that raises the bar
In developing the brand, we were asked to create a campaign to communicate the benefits of being with NICEIC. As the photography had not yet been shot, we develop a finely craft keyline illustrative approach and blended this with a strong narrative, existing stills and carefully crafted motion graphics.
A tone of voice that flexes to each audience
NICEIC audience segments include trade professionals, householders, large public and private organisations, the media and the industry itself (government departments, standards organisations and the likes of the Health and Safety Executive). We produced an extensive tone of voice guidelines to help writers and the marketing team produce copy that resonates with these diverse audiences. We included many examples of headlines and paragraphs of body copy, supported by a rigorous style guide covering the subtleties of naming, terminology, grammar and other stylistic preferences.
All brought to life in a series of industry campaigns
The guidelines formalised some of the creative development we started in our first campaign for the brand – promoting training – and we’ve already applied the new look and feel to two national campaigns communicating customer benefits and trade insurance – both have outperformed expectations.
We enjoyed creating this work with NICEIC – not only for its contribution to public safety, but for the opportunity to apply our creativity to one of the industry’s oldest and most respected trade organisations.
So next time you need some electrical work doing, look out for the NICEIC logo. It’s the sign of a serious professional.