How Should Your Campaign Brand Relate to Your Organizational Brand?

What an innocent little question! Doesn’t it sound like there should be a definitive answer? Isn’t this covered somewhere in that 60-page brand guidelines PDF you haven’t opened since rollout?

Ah, but it’s a sneaky one.

While it might seem like a simple “brand compliance” matter of dos/don’ts and rules of the road, this question actually draws both your campaign strategy and brand strategy into a single conversation with years of consequences. And of course, both halves of that conversation have their own goals and owners, timelines and turfs…

There’s no single answer – every organization’s case is unique – but over the years, we’ve developed a framework that can help bring the options into focus.

Call it the campaign brand family reunion: you know the two brands are related, but how closely and in what way?

Let’s pull up to the family reunion and explore how your campaign brand and organizational brand can relate in different ways, what each option looks like, and when you might want to consider each.

Parent & Child

You can see where they get it from!

This is the most straightforward, though not the most common, way for your organization and campaign brand to relate. The org brand defines the creative elements available to the campaign, and the campaign is an instance or sub-brand within the organizational brand system.

What This Looks Like:

• Campaign voice in close harmony with overall brand, often weaving in language, themes, and taglines used in other brand communications
• Campaign visual identity defined mostly or entirely around existing branded typefaces, colors, and creative treatments
• Campaign materials look cohesive next to other organizational communications and publications

Why You Might Go This Route:

• You’re rolling out a new/refreshed organizational brand right around the launch of the campaign, don’t want to introduce two new brand systems at once, and the campaign can help “burn in” the new organizational brand.
• It’s not going to be a very brand-driven campaign and/or isn’t going to have a significant public phase that requires making a splash.
• You don’t have time to go through a campaign branding process, or you’re concerned about branding becoming a distraction and hangup for the stakeholders you need to mobilize.

Example: University of Northern Iowa: “Our Tomorrow”

The public launch of this campaign coincided with the launch of a new university brand system, so the direction was clear: Let the campaign help “burn in” the new brand, and avoid introducing too many new looks at once.

The campaign logo is built around the brand’s primary colors and typefaces (including a new brand serif for the campaign name), and it borrows the forward lean from the gold slash for the italicized treatment of the campaign name.

Siblings

There’s a strong family resemblance but they’re each their own person.

This is probably the most common way for campaign brand and org brand to relate. Siblings share about 50 percent of their DNA on average, and in this configuration, the campaign brand has about that level of overlap with the organizational brand while also bringing in new elements that set it apart.

What This Looks Like:

• Voice and messaging feel consonant but the campaign has a distinct urgency, boldness, or scale
• Campaign visual identity uses org brand elements but often in new ways: a brand typeface paired with a new typeface, lifting up a color from the secondary or tertiary brand palette that doesn’t get used often, or pairing a wholly new color with a standard brand color
• Campaign materials look special and elevated next to other organizational communications, but not to the point of brand confusion

Why You Might Go This Route:

• Your organizational brand is well established and you want the campaign to feel right at home in it, but you still need to bring in some fresh energy.
• You want the campaign to clearly stand out relative to annual fund and other organizational communications, but you don’t want to introduce brand confusion.
• Developing a distinctive campaign brand will engage and energize your key stakeholders but the org brand will provide enough guardrails to keep the process from running away on you.

Example: Meharry Medical College / “Campaign 150”

This campaign, tied to a major anniversary, tries to balance history and future. A bold new typeface for the “150” and a much different sense of scale help set it apart from the organizational brand, while the primary color, branded sans serif, and arch icon tucked into the zero help connect it to the org brand.

Cousins

They don’t look alike, but they share a background.

In these cases, the campaign has far greater creative latitude to depart from the organizational brand and bring in novel elements – but it still tells a story about the larger organization and adds something complementary to the organizational brand.

What This Looks Like:

• Campaign voice and messaging capture attention with a meaningfully different energy, urgency, or aspirational reach
• Campaign visual identity features substantially new elements (type, color, style) with a much lighter tether to the organizational brand system
• Campaign materials and communications surprise and delight audiences already familiar with the organizational brand

Why You Might Go This Route:

• Your organizational brand is long in the tooth and due for a refresh, and the campaign can be a place to explore new directions.
• You need the campaign to capture attention, change perspectives, and convey “this isn’t business as usual.”
• Your organizational brand is very consumer-facing (e.g. optimized for enrollment or healthcare consumer marketing) and your campaign communications need a substantially different tone and feeling.

Example: Jefferson Land Trust / “Look To The Land”

This campaign brand is superficially quite different from the org brand, with no shared design vocabulary other than the arch shape. Yet the campaign name sets up an anthem for the organization: for everything important, we look to the land. And the campaign’s visual hallmarks – a rough-hewn typeface that reminds you of park signage, an illustration styled on the contour lines from orienteering maps – may not come from the org brand, but still feel organic to the mission.

A Special Case: The Heir Apparent

What about when the campaign brand ends up changing, sometimes even becoming, the organizational brand? It’s more common than you might expect.

A striking example: Yellowstone Park Foundation (the park’s official fundraising partner) and the Yellowstone Association (the park’s education partner) merged in 2016 to unite their missions under a single org. The name they chose for the new entity? Yellowstone Forever – the name of a fundraising campaign that the Foundation had completed not long before.

In less dramatic examples, elements from the campaign brand get absorbed into a brand refresh or carried over to the organizational brand all the time.

You don’t necessarily need to plan for this, but if you know your org brand is due for a refresh down the road, a campaign offers a wonderful opportunity to explore some new directions without committing to them permanently.

Many of the most creatively compelling campaigns express where the brand is going, not just where it is today.

It’s All In The Family

Again, there’s no single right answer here – we love all of our family members near and far! But this framework – how much shared DNA? How much novelty vs. continuity? – can help bring the goals and boundaries of the campaign brand into focus before you start generating concepts.