Crowley

Crowley has a 130-year-old legacy as a family-owned business. Providing services globally, growing from a maritime and logistics business into a tech-forward and innovation supply company, Crowley has been empowering the movement of goods and peoples around the world. Crowley needed a new and refreshed bold brand to tell its story, and shine a light on what it does now and its roadmap for the future.

As the business was striving to change existing brand perceptions, Crowley realised that its previous brand identity and positioning were outdated. It didn’t reflect the transformations the brand had undergone in its lifetime or the importance of Crowley as powering the lifelines of the world.

By shifting towards becoming a more sustainable and socially responsible business, Crowley had the unique opportunity to strengthen its position in the market as a company that can balance today’s interests and tomorrow’s challenges. Quietly powering from behind the scenes, Crowley is a company leading with purpose. Having identified the need for digital and brand transformation, FutureBrand North America was tasked to create a bold brand identity that not only showcases the full expertise of Crowley but guides them on their roadmap to the future.

Committed to signalling radical change with a bold new brand, FutureBrand developed the anchoring brand idea around ‘Fluency in Movement’ which feeds into Crowley’s purpose, value, positioning and personality; deepening the values they create, needs they meet and roles they play. The focal brand concept elevated Crowley’s unparalleled excellence in communicating and interacting with its international partners, alongside emphasising its movements of cargo and assets as a purpose-driven company seeking to change the world.

Brand Architecture

To give a concrete focus and direction to Crowley’s forward-thinking work, we created a bespoke brand architecture framework that seeks to highlight Crowley’s technology and innovation capabilities. We defined the organizing principle around two core pillars of ‘Moving Today’ and ‘Leading Tomorrow’. We sought to break down silos among business units and embrace a partner-centric approach while demonstrating their core capabilities and strengths. This structure also provided Crowley with an opportunity to showcase their creative thinking and pioneering mindset.

Building on the high-level organisation, we crafted a clearly defined brand hierarchy and signature system that helped focus and govern the brand’s expression. Within each business vertical, we include the digital platform C Sight, which provides real-time dashboards for visibility, helping Crowley deliver a more seamless brand experience across the portfolio.

Verbal Identity

A new verbal identity was created to define how the brand speaks and sounds, along with a messaging playbook to guide consistent content development and supported by a new tagline ‘Carry the world forward’ all of which embody the brand strategy. We had to ensure Crowley’s personality attributes underpinned their overarching tone of voice, positioning the company as purpose-driven experts. We also consulted Crowley in the naming of its different digital platforms, including the internal Chat Bot ‘Alvie’ and digital platform ‘Crowley C Sight’.

Visual Identity

The new identity needed to embody movement and motion, transitioning from the prior Crowley red to a vibrant blue which signalled a new direction for the brand. In-depth semiotics and visual audits were conducted to ensure that the logo and graphic artwork could sit comfortably as an avatar online, but also scale up for a physical shipping container.

We echoed the tone of voice in the photography and created an exhaustive suite of items for launch including a PowerPoint template, icon library, Microsoft Teams background, email signatures, screensavers and more.

The new preimmunised identity all echoed ‘Fluency in Movement, evolving to sit comfortably alongside the future-forward work Crowley is doing.

"I needed a partner that was open-minded, collaborative in their approach and could bring along our Board members to embrace the change in direction for our brand. FutureBrand not only exceeded my expectations, but the team truly understood Crowley’s DNA, respected its heritage and reflected our expertise in the new bold and strong branding. FutureBrand’s team was very agile, quick on their feet, and understood my ambition for the business." - John Crowley, CMO - Crowley.