Brand agency Nucleus creates brand to guide business leaders towards their next horizon

With business leaders transitioning from corporate life earlier than ever before, how does a CEO or senior executive deal with the sudden loss of influence, support systems and long-established sense of purpose? The end of a long-term corporate career can represent the greatest bundle of challenges and opportunities in an executive’s lifetime. Bringing together experts from many fields to create a network of highly experienced individuals, this business focuses on creating tailor-made programmes for senior executives transitioning from corporate life. But what should the business be called? And how should the value proposition be articulated? Those challenges were assigned to Nucleus.

In a polarised market where a handful of discreet specialists operate behind closed doors and large executive search and consulting firms only allude to transitioning advisory services, no clear sector vocabulary exists, so established benchmarks were few and far between. So we worked with the founders to deconstruct their business concept and rebuild it using inputs from our research, interviews and insights. The first output was the business purpose definition, which is ‘To support business leaders with their career transitions’, with the value proposition summarised as ‘Discover your next horizon’.

The value proposition then fed into the brand naming process, where, after some deliberation we recommended the concept of ‘rebirth’, settling on the name ‘Renascent’. Before recommending this distinctive and meaningful name, we filtered our naming shortlist to identify any possible trade mark infringements and also secured appropriate high level domain names. Renascent scored highly and came through our filtering process with flying colours, so our trade mark attorneys at Nucleus-IP applied for registration in August 2018, which was accepted on to the UK trade marks register in December.

The brand design and website then followed, with the brand mark expressed in a crisp lowercase classic serif font, with colour emphasising the first two letters. The design suggests an approachable and highly professional organisation, structured to provide one-to-one help and guidance. The website is simple and straightforward, with copy aligning with the value proposition and a home page image of a Lynn Chadwick sculpture – featuring a lone figure at sunset – to evoke the emotional challenges of senior executive transition.