Shaw & Co

Market context

Scope: Research & insight > positioning, strategy & TOV > brand system, brand guidelines 
Sector: Corporate Finance. 

Shaw & Co operates in the corporate finance (CF) market, it offers advisory support and transactional services to businesses: selling, buying, funding, and learning masterclasses.

The company is on a mission to democratise CF, often seen as an impenetrable and inhuman world for SME businesses, making it more accessible, open, and transparent – helping them to achieve greater outcomes for their businesses.

Challenge

To support its ambitious growth plan, the brand needed to re-articulate its value proposition and competitive positioning.
The pandemic allowed the company the opportunity to conduct internal and external research to understand how its employees, business partners and clients valued the brand – to start building something different, authentic, and disruptive.

Big ambition

The proposition is based on how Shaw & Co enables its clients to achieve their greatest business ambition – whether growing, funding or exiting their business – ‘We turn your big ambitions into greater outcomes’.

The creative story brings to life the value the brand creates for its clients, Structure visualised and verbalised it by putting the spotlight on client success stories.

While the new brand work conveys both the functional and emotional side of the story, the creative solution continues the distinctively human approach across all elements, launching into the marketplace with a disruptive green colour palette, supported with vibrant accents, to create stand out in a sea of corporate blues.

The approach continues with a bold typeface to reflect ‘big ambition’ and a handwritten typeface to promote a more human element.

Hand-drawn devices (arrows, underscores etc.) are used throughout brand comms as points of emphasis in key messaging.

The strategy was to run a human approach throughout all comms touchpoints supported with language and messaging that is simple and clear, and which uses no industry jargon. 

To bring our ideas, brand architecture, marketing touchpoints and client stories to life we engaged with Structure who immediately understood our strategic and creative goals.
Paul Mills, CMO

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