How to Build an Unstoppable Brand

What is an unstoppable brand? It’s a brand that can withstand cultural shifts and economic shocks. It’s a brand that knows how to manage the tension between its heritage and its future. It’s a brand that can think boldly, act bravely, and deliver brilliant results in challenging times.

We know unstoppable brands because we build them every day. We help brands achieve success by taking the best they have to offer and reinforcing it with the intelligence and creative expression needed to keep them strong. To this end, we have refreshed our agency’s look in order to communicate our commitment to building unstoppable brands and securing brand longevity for clients. With a long-term, independent perspective, and more than half a century of marketing experience, we are doubling down on this mission as we enter a new age.

Great brands are much more than the sum of their parts. But creating balance and harmony of these parts is necessary for the larger whole. In designing Brownstein’s refreshed identity, our creative team looked to sharpen the edges of key elements from across the history of the agency, finding ways to both remember the past and prepare for the future.

This approach complemented on our research into the concept of brand longevity: The achievement of social relevance and ongoing consumer engagement over a sustained period of time and across consumer lifecycles. With our new model, which will be explored in future blog posts, we can look at brands holistically to help inform marketing decisions through a winning formula. By mapping the brand ecosystem, and the cause-and-effect relationships of change across all brand elements through time, we can see how marketing decisions send ripples across the brand. This allows us to see marketing projects as new interpretations of a brand’s innate spirit.

A brand in charge of making and shaping other brands has to work in concert with all kinds of graphics and styles. Therefore, our new look exists in a kaleidoscopic universe of secondary color combinations and variations. It is a canvas from which other brands are made. Nonetheless, Brownstein’s primary colors — red, black, and charcoal gray — still pay homage to our iconic door at 215 Broad in the heart of Philadelphia.

For the typeface, our creative team looked back at the origins of the agency in the Creative Revolution of the 1960s. Brownstein, the agency’s simplified moniker, returns to these roots with a clean and bold modernist typeface. Moving forward, Brownstein Group will refer to the parent company of Brownstein and its sister agency Nucleus Digital, positioning the agency for growth and diversification in the future through additional service offerings and brands.

Meanwhile, the agency’s new crossroads symbol, which retains the iconic nine-square form of recent brand iterations, takes on a new meaning. Whereas it once represented the range and creative depth of the agency as a color palette, the new symbol is a versatile representation of the crossroads moment: where brands make the decisions that will carry them forward into the future.

We are at a crossroads now. With unprecedented cultural, social, and economic changes underway, brands need a partner that will help them know when to adapt and when to be steadfast. They need to become unstoppable, and accelerate through change. Our new motto “We Build Unstoppable Brands” will serve as a reminder of our role in the journeys of our clients, and continue to guide our work as we begin a new chapter in our agency’s history.

We’re thrilled that you’ll be joining us for the ride.