Luminate’s tangible differentiators of transparent, comprehensive data — with a singular focus on entertainment and music — were superior, and the company’s vision of creating a savvy, creative, and thriving entertainment industry stood out beyond industry competitors. So, we showcased this distinction through its brand identity. As the tenured voice of its industry, Luminate could empower its customers to make data-informed decisions that create an immediate and stabilizing competitive advantage while priming them for aspirational thinking and future success.

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Luminate identified their brand attributes as Dynamic, Certain, and Clever. These essential elements allowed our work to project Luminate as the independent authority of its industry. We used these attributes to build a brand foundation of trust that would allow Luminate to appeal directly to audiences and define meaningful differentiation.

We also worked with Luminate to evaluate their brand architecture. Brand architecture defines the different levels within a brand and provides a hierarchy that explains the relationships between the different products, services, and components that make up a company’s portfolio of offerings.

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Luminate, its brands, and its various products retained their legacy identities and therefore shared no obvious brand elements across the portfolio. After thorough research, we recommended architecting the future brand portfolio deliberately, with new audiences and brand trajectory in mind. Luminate’s brands all are connected to and extend from a core belief in delivering comprehensive and high-quality data solely for organizations within the entertainment and music ecosystem. Though distinct in their markets, the brands and their products can be thought of as pieces of the larger sum of Luminate: a purpose to empower these organizations with valuable data and a commitment to do so through independence and objectivity.

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Luminate's core messages — purpose, mission, vision, unique selling proposition, and value proposition — are foundational to all aspects of the brand identity. Together, these statements verbally represent Luminate from an ideological perspective. As the name implies, core messages are those that are central to the identity of a brand and a company, and which exist regardless of audience or market. A core values workshop helped Luminate develop three unique statements designed to align employees and communicate the brand’s promise of accurate and accessible data to prospective hires.

We wanted to present Luminate as the confident, credible authority of data in entertainment and music. We needed to communicate its past in the present, for the future, by turning a timeline of mergers into a tangible story of unique expertise — all of the accrued knowledge and experience over three decades, channeled and refocused to help shape the future of music and entertainment. Luminate is the industry’s enduring data partner who’s building for the future and the only independent solution who believes in the democratization of data. Luminate knows the industry better than the industry knows itself and answers the questions no one thinks to ask.

Core messages lay the foundation which we build upon through voice and tone work. Luminate's position in the entertainment and music industry allowed us to write with a bit of edge every now and then, completely distinguishing Luminate in the data space. It enabled Luminate to be, at once, unapologetic and approachable, cool and community-minded. Clever but not too cocky; quick but not condescending; enthusiastically insightful and affably amused; not too serious, and never too stiff.

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We continued to work with Luminate on their verbal identity by developing their Audience Messaging Framework, Brand Story, and Brand Messaging Framework.

The Luminate logo uses the first letter of the brand name as a visual mechanism for its core offering: the opportunity to find objective, meaningful data that leads to better decisions for people in the entertainment industry.

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Its presentation is unconventional and unmistakable. Built from a typeface called FK Screamer, the logo carries a level of authority and confidence that many simply can't. The thickness of the letters, upward trajectory, and uppercase formatting invokes a masthead from a subculture magazine — one everyone is going to want to read.

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This L frame opens up a number of possibilities for framing content, imagery, and even visual language.

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Energetic, edgy, and bold, this palette is full of retina rockers ready for any opportunity to shine. Setting typography and the logo in these colors ensures ultra-high contrast. The opportunity of this type of extended palette also allows Luminate to amplify or reduce the perceived energy when and where it's needed in the brand identity.

Our retainer service provided design and writing services to help establish Luminate’s new brand architecture across their legacy products and identities. We broadened the application of their brand guidelines by providing an expanded icon set and updating their sales and marketing materials. When rebranding, it is also important to consider how you communicate your new brand to new and existing employees. Our team drafted a brand quick-start guide and onboarding materials to support the team’s internal rollout.