FPL Advisory Group
A New Brand Identity for a Consulting Firm

By Design Partners was recently engaged in a brand identity assignment for FPL Advisory Group. The organization has a 25+ year history and is made up of four companies, which offer professional services in executive and director recruitment; leadership consulting; compensation consulting; and organizational, financial & strategic consulting. Somewhat confused and overwhelmed? Yeah, we were too.

Here’s the brand identity they were using at the time we were engaged:

Want to try to fit that on a lapel pin? How about a business card. Yeah, we didn’t think so.

Our assignment was to create cohesion and build structure into the brand. Our first recommendation was to unify the brand by changing the name to “Ferguson” or “FPL Ferguson Partners,” either of which is at least an interesting name, as well as a name with brand equity. And that’s got to be worth something. It’s important to mention that FPL Advisory Group doesn’t really offer professional services. It’s just a name that serves somewhat like a holding company. How important is that to a client buying professional services? That’s an important question. But there would be no name change. That was a mandate. So the challenge became how to unify and a create cohesion and build structure without changing the name. Definitely not our first choice, but we’re always up for a challenge.

Our solution was to design a new symbol, use modern typography, and introduce a new color palette that would unify the four business entities. We needed to be strategic and create something that would resonate with the firm’s present and potential clients.

A new logo was conceived to help position the organization as state-of-the art, modern, cutting-edge, leading-edge, greater than, more than, up-to-date, up-to-the-minute, progressive, and most importantly — advanced. Our proposed logo borrows heavily from the widely known and widely used advance forward and greater than symbols. Would the angled capital F be seen as falling backward? Perhaps, but the forward symbol counteracts that while subtly and cleverly including the capital F, which makes the logo unique. Especially when combined with a tag line of something like:

Your business, advanced.

Even without the help of a tag line, the advance message is communicated. And essentially what FPL Advisory Group, Ferguson Partners, FPL Associates, and FPL Consulting does through the services it offers is help advance its clients’ businesses. It helps businesses become more competitive by creating cultures with stronger leaders and more effective teams. We could definitely create a strong and compelling brand story around that!

While based on the capital letter F, the new brand identity references "advance" and "greater than" symbols.
The new symbol, with a color change, is used to identify and unify the four business entities.
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The new brand identity applied to the FPL Advisory Group website.

B ut somewhere along the way — and after completing a fair amount of work creating the new identity and applying it to everything from proposals to the corporate website — things went awry. Worse yet, a new internal logo committee was developed. It’s common knowledge among design professionals that design created by people who know little about design, and design by committee is rarely successful. Most often, it’s a disaster. The kiss of death. At any rate, the logo committee came up with this:

Want to try to fit that on a lapel pin? How about a business card. Yeah, we didn’t think so.

We don’t know what happened to FPL Advisory Group, FPL Consulting, or for that matter, the word management. Perhaps the mandate changed? Perhaps the committee doesn’t understand that good design is never confusing and effective branding must be strategic.

What we learned is what we knew all along. The organization — well, at least the members of the logo committee — fail to have a clear understanding of who or what the organization is. Even the logo committee can’t decide on one name. How could they come up with a solution to a branding problem that avoids the problem — unless they fail to understand the problem? Cast aside our proposed logo. Does that remove any brand confusion or create any clarity? No. It only creates more confusion by eliminating something that worked to unify the branding.

By Design Partners was not given direct access to the decision makers and was not part of the presentation of our work, which was lauded by the marketing director and employees who want and understand the need for a consistent and strategic branding program. After all, it’s why that organization hired the marketing director. We learned that not insisting on direct access to the decision makers was a mistake. And we own it. We also learned an important lesson. Good strategic brand design isn’t always going to be embraced or accepted. Perhaps the assignment was flawed from the beginning in that FPL Advisory Group, Ferguson Partners, FPL Associates, and FPL Consulting needs a new brand identity, but they first need to understand who they are. If they fail to understand and are confused about that, we think their clients will be confused and fail to understand them.