Branding agency in Chicago

Because Bruno designs a brand around the people who’ll use it every day, your team as much as your customers. Part of that habit comes from Uber Works, whose UX was reworked round after round based on feedback from Chicago restaurant owners. Today, around forty people on staff handle the strategy, the identity and the website. A brand is judged in use, not in the presentation.

Bruno runs Chicago projects from San Francisco, at 415 Mission St, and brings in the Paris team when the brand is also looking at Europe. Chicago runs two hours ahead of California and seven hours behind Paris. In practice, your mornings overlap with the Paris afternoon and your afternoons with the California morning. Meetings happen over video, with the people named on your project.

A branding agency works on what customers think after they leave, as well as what they see. Bruno ties together three things studios often keep apart: positioning, the way the brand writes (verbal identity) and visual identity. One team holds all three. That’s what stops an elegant logo from sitting on top of a fuzzy message.

Since 2012, more than 500 brands have come through Bruno, mostly French ones. For Qonto, an online bank had to look as solid as a traditional one. LegalPlace got two registers: restrained in the product, hand-drawn in its campaigns. And the Uber project tells the story of the back-and-forth with Chicago restaurant owners.

Yes, and food service is how Bruno got to know Chicago in the first place. Uber Works helped restaurant owners hire a server or a dishwasher at short notice, and they were the ones testing the app. Later, two McDonald’s restaurants in Normandy hired the agency to announce 24/7 delivery with a Call of Duty campaign. McDonald’s global headquarters is in Chicago. That project never went near it.

Bruno asks for two circles: a small group that decides, and a wider one we interview. The decision-makers, as few as possible, sign off on each stage. The interviews go further, to sales, customer service and sometimes your customers, often one-on-one so people speak freely. A brand approved by twenty people tends to look like a compromise.

Count on three to five months on average for a full branding project at Bruno, strategy and identities included. That’s an average, not a promise: starting from scratch, rebranding or rolling a brand out on two continents all move at different speeds. What weighs most is usually how many people sign off. Hence the small circle.