ABPI Brand overview
The brief
The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) exists to make the UK the best place in the world to research, develop and use new medicines. Its members supply cutting edge treatments that improve and save the lives of millions of people in the UK. Due to our successful ongoing working relationship with them, they approached us to evolve its brand to portray it is a relevant, modern, forward thinking, and an inclusive organisation. The existing brand contained a ‘tree of life’ motif and their ‘bringing medicines to life’ strapline. The brand had become dated and unsuitable for a thought leadership, policy organisation with the logo becoming increasingly impractical to use on social and digital platforms.
The creative idea
Given the importance of brand recognition amongst ABPI’s audiences, there was a strong feeling on all sides that this should be a brand evolution rather than the creation of a totally new brand identity. By taking this approach, ABPI were acknowledging that they weren’t forgetting their past. They understood the respect that the existing mark had within the industry and was simply moving forward and evolving like all modern organisations should. The brand refresh took the essence of the original brand and made it more relevant to the modern world with a much simpler, cleaner, confident, and dynamic brand application. We took this ethos and followed it through all the materials we generated including digital, print, video, animation, interior graphics, signage and wayfinding.
Disciplines
Logotype design
Guidelines
Large format graphics
Social media
Editorial
Microsoft template design
Animation
Video work
Reflecting the new brand in ABPI’s workplace environments
The brand refresh corresponded with ABPI moving location from Victoria to London Bridge. Therefore, it made perfect sense to reinforce the new brand and its ethos in its new workspace. It was our previous experience working on interiors with clients such as Twitter and The Francis Crick Institute that encouraged ABPI to do something more adventurous with the internal brand application to celebrate the brand evolution and their occupancy of this new, modern, and contemporary work space.
Various templates were created to facilitate multiple forms of communication. Social media templates for LinkedIn and Twitter were either image-led, or icon and messaging-led. Print templates were generated to help implement prestigious A4 reports and required us to create a typographic hierarchy that included: highlighted copy, large format stats, standard body copy, and Introductory copy.
“Having worked with the To The Point Team over a number of years, they knew our brand as well as we did. Over this time, they worked with us to stretch our existing brand as far as possible. This meant that when there was an opportunity to make a real step forward and evolve the fundamental components of our brand, TTP was able to deliver initial concepts exactly to specification. The way in which they took the time to understand our audiences and how we practically use our brand meant that their initial concepts appealed to us from the start – and then we set out on the process of refining. As a result, we feel as though the ABPI now has a brand that reflects us as a serious organisation focused on thought leadership, which is practical to use, and which will help us stand out.”
Elliot Dunster, Executive Director, Corporate Affairs and Devolved Nations at ABPI
The brief
We were originally contacted by the ABPI to create digital guidelines and explore a more considered approach to demonstrate how their existing brand could be brought to life with engaging visual assets, video, and animation. In addition to the guidelines, the team at ABPI required a suite of video and animation showreels and social media assets to help clearly communicate the instrumental role they play and the value that they add in their industry. This work was carried out over a few years and led to the new brief and work shown above, demonstrating both our ability to work and enhance existing brands, and create new identities.
The creative idea
Once we had developed a more interactive and user-friendly set of digital guidelines, we then worked on bringing the strategy to life. We decided to interlace talking heads and storytelling with animation to create an engaging, distinctive, thought-provoking set of six, 1-minute videos, which utilised ABPI’s existing colour palette and typography to great effect.
We designed them so they had the capability of being shown individually or grouped together to create a longer 6-minute video. We ensured that the animated elements could be separated out as individual still graphics that could then be promoted on social media to highlight key statements or statistics about the organisation.
Disciplines
Animation
Guidelines
Social media
As part of the project, we were asked to produce a short animated video giving a quick overview of the purpose of the survey and some of 2022’s key findings. Using a script and voiceover provided by the client, we wanted to support the narrative with simple yet effective visuals, so as not to distract but to help illustrate the videos key messages.
To find out more about how we plan, design and create animations in more detail, read our animation process presentation.
“Every two years when we come to publish our biennial industry-academic links survey data, we explore new ideas for presenting the data in order to help us and the industry present the findings in an engaging and impactful way. We have been pleased to work with TTP, who produced a brilliant suite of professional animations and graphics to complement and bring our data to life.”
Andrew Croydon, ABPI Skills & Education Policy and Examinations Director
The ABPI was aware that basic information was not being communicated clearly both internally and externally. The story about the lifecycle of medicines and medicines policy needed to be clearer, as did the ABPI’s relationship with the NHS and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
A key component and requirement of the brief was providing ABPI with the tools to convey key messages via social media. We created a series of Photoshop templates that could convey varying levels of content including image rich, text rich, stat based and industry quote posts.
There was a desire on behalf of ABPI to make the publication section of their existing website more interesting and interactive. The format of this section was a series of downloadable PDFs which were static and lacked vitality. As a means of providing visual stimuli, we created a series of templates that would present key information in bite-size pieces that had a degree of animation.
There were gaps in ABPI’s guidelines which included tone of voice, social media assets, photo-graphic styles, video and infographics. We combined their existing documents and newly created sections into one interactive set of guidelines that covered every aspect of the brand and how it should be implemented.
The report focussed on how Clinical research had become the topic of public interest in a way that could never have predicted. As the global research community attempted to find vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, the general public around the world were following every development.
“tothepoint helped transform how we communicate content that is easy to understand and share. They helped us explain more clearly the number of ways in which medicine costs are managed as well as depict the life-cycle of a branded medicine. Already, we are seeing the positive impact this has generated – greater time spent on our website by users and improved understanding amongst stakeholders of what is a complex industry.”
Aileen Thompson,
Executive Director,
Communications at the ABPI
