When Alain Bergeron joined Astral Media Inc. in 2001, he came with strings attached.
“I joined them under one condition: they had to put brand management in my title, because I thought [Astral] had a great opportunity to work wonders,” he says. “The brand was not known at all. This was before the Standard [Radio] acquisition, before digital signs, before the urban street furniture contract in Toronto.”
Astral has changed since Bergeron became Astral’s brand steward, and so has corporate branding itself. In 2001, many corporations’ logos carried an institutional vibe and wore conservative shades of blue. Astral created its straight-lined and blocky “A” logo to carve a niche in the corporate firmament alongside the Unilevers of the world. Its approximately $300 million in revenues put the company a few rungs down from Unilever on total valuation at the time, but at least its letterhead could hold its own.
“What this logo did was tell people we were solid, that we were to be taken seriously, and that we were stable,” Bergeron says. “We were determined to be a player and it did a wonderful job.” That stability led to growth–the $1.2 billion acquisition of the Standard radio stations, winning Toronto’s street furniture contract in 2007, and earning Canadian oversight of big-name international media brands such as Virgin, HBO and Disney.
Speaking to Marketing in May, just ahead of the company’s largest rebranding in a decade, Bergeron pointed out that companies like Unilever had been changing their logos from stolid to soft in recent years. “Looking at Unilever’s old logo, I see the Twin Towers,” he said, referring to the blocky, monolithic sides of its old U-shaped identity. “It’s very ‘corporate America.’ Its new logo tells a very different story of earth-friendly, feel-good life. The little fish and flower shapes cannot be further from the old logo, and yet you recognize it.”
In the autumn of 2008, Astral wanted to know if it should follow suit, and quietly invited three agencies–one from Montreal, one from Vancouver and Toronto’s Juniper Park–to offer their thoughts. At the time, Omnicom’s Juniper Park was hungry for its first large-scale Canadian client.
After launching in Toronto in 2007 with a healthy portion of Frito-Lay’s U.S. snack portfolio, the agency had only landed smaller Canadian projects. Bolstered by an increasing number of assignments from Frito-Lay in the U.S.–Sun Chips, Quaker, Smartfood, to name a few–it was in no danger of closing down without Astral. But that October when Astral announced the Omnicom agency had been hired to work on a long-term “project,” it was a milestone for Juniper in its country of origin.
“These guys are pretty masterful at combining [their disciplines] together,” said Bergeron, of Juniper Park’s practice of blending strategic, creative and design teams together. “They really get our business… We made our selection and never looked back. It’s been a phenomenal ride.” Juniper’s reputation has been to go deep on research before starting the creative process. Astral was no exception. The agency compiled every piece of internal brand data Bergeron could provide, from awareness metrics to reputation management surveys, to assess the brand’s status at the time. Then, over six months, Juniper conducted 52 interviews with employees across business units, third-party vendors and partner organizations to add some qualitative data to the survey’s numbers.
“This was a company that made its numbers 54 quarters in a row; we knew they were disciplined,” says Nykoliation. But the interviews revealed that, among other things, many also saw the company as very creative. “Usually those two things don’t go together.” Suddenly, that corporate blue logo looked a lot colder. It had to go. “We told Juniper the new logo must capture scale, strength, performance, rigour… the foundation blocks of the brand, but also convey passion, humanity, dynamism, knowledge and imagination,” Bergeron said.
Juniper’s solution was a rounder, brighter identity built around the word Astral (written in a lower-case letters loosely based on the Bliss typeface) and the letter “A.” The new identity uses a five-colour palette of soft colours that, while brighter than the old blue (which is incorporated into the new design), are calm enough to not be ostentatious. The colours are often separated by a wavy white line, and used in varying combinations and formats depending on the context. The white line spells out headlines in the consumer-facing campaign that’s currently in-market, forming the words “play” and “create” in a soft handwritten script.
“The logo can expand to fill the space it’s in, or contract to be on a business card,” Nykoliation says. And speaking of contractions, Astral shrunk the number of its internal brands from 19 down to eight. It’s partly an attempt to bind regional teams for, say radio sales, to a single, cohesive national organization.
“There was way too much flexibility in using the master brand,” Bergeron said. “There wasn’t enough order or structure.” The old divisions remain intact, he added, but will use the identity of one of the eight internal brands. The new Astral met the world at large on May 27 through a consumer campaign, but employees started getting glimpses a week prior as part of an internal activation campaign. Nykoliation says it wasn’t just a matter of pulling back the curtain for the “ta-da” moment.
So every Astral employee was given a marker and T-shirt that said “Mon Astral” or “My Astral Is.” Each was asked to write or draw their thoughts about the company on the shirt, and then upload a photo or video of them wearing it to an internal website. On May 26, the images were presented in an online mosaic of Astral’s new logo, CEO Ian Greenberg made an introductory video presentation and staff were given various items, like notebooks, that bore the new branding.
“We needed to put the [identity] in people’s hands and let them walk around with it,” Nykoliation says.
With consumers now fully aware of Astral’s softer side, a B2B campaign is expected shortly. Juniper, having completed its project, has moved on to work with its second Canadian client, Virgin Mobile. And Bergeron himself is moving on, having announced his departure from the company on May 31, mere days after the rebranding. “I feel that I have achieved my mission here, and want to take some time to reflect before embarking on the next stage of my career,” he said. It seems Bergeron feels he’s worked the wonders he was hired for.
