Sharper Thinking? Definitely.
I love it when Steve (my Razor co-founder) surprises me. Over one of our Monday morning coffees last year he suggested it was time to launch a new website and alongside it, relaunch our positioning. Jiminy. 8 months later, it’s happened. Launched, bedded in and now we’re all on board with Sharper Thinking.
It sounds SO obvious right? We’re called Razor, of course Sharper Thinking is what we stand for. I look back now at the various punning stories we’ve woven into what we deliver – cutting through, cutting edge, cutting to the chase and wonder why it took us so long to narrow our philosophy down to two snappy words.
The truth is, like many brands, you get stuck in your own initial ‘reason to believe’ and you don’t always take the time to introspect. We had our 5 core values, our mission, our vision. We spend time each year discussing these with the team and making sure they are embedded in everything we do. But in our 8 years of business and residual love for our first website we never quite got around to challenging the over-arching expression of ourselves.
The agency we selected (Big Brand Ideas – they’re ace) not only designed our beautiful website and evolved our logo but they challenged us from the start. They were briefed to evolve us, not just our look and feel. They took the time to understand our business (even before we commissioned them), they immersed themselves in our world and they helped us craft the new expressions of ourselves. I’m not convinced we would have worked so hard or so effectively, without them.
To the outsider, our new website is probably ‘just a website’. Our evolved logo is ‘just a bit different’. The response from our clients and friends has been positive and we look back at our old ‘us’ and think it all looks so old-fashioned – overnight. We feel instantly more grown up, more professional and more in tune with what our clients really want. The process and the results have provided us with a whack of oxygen, a reason to talk about ourselves more confidently and a new impetus to get out there and talk Razor. We’ve always delivered it but now we really believe we look the part. That’s Sharper Thinking.