Truly Deeply rebrands leading Australian law firm, Maddocks.

A new logo and refreshed visual identity for Maddocks marks the next step in the firm’s evolution as the modern Australian law firm. 

Maddocks CEO, Paul Woods, says the new logo signifies a new chapter for Maddocks and is a distinctive and unique symbol of quality, confidence and trusted knowledge.

“Maddocks is a firm with specialist teams, deep sector expertise, and an intimate understanding of Australia’s commercial, government, and regulatory landscapes, known for solving complex, high‑stakes challenges. This move reinforces our strengthened commitment to delivering exceptional outcomes for our clients, investing in our people and making a positive difference in our communities,” added Woods.

For more than 20 years, the iconic logo (often likened to a ‘barcode’), has been a familiar symbol of the trusted quality and expertise associated with Maddocks. While that logo has served the firm well, the way clients engage with legal services has evolved – and so too has Maddocks.

Through extensive consultation across the firm, Truly Deeply aligned the new business strategy and vision behind a single, clear brand proposition.

‘The modern Australian law firm’ stayed at the heart of the brand, but it now carries real meaning. A new brand story, messaging framework and personality bring together the firm’s distinctive culture, its value and service mindset, and its ambition to reshape how legal services are delivered.

The new identity is modern, trusted and collaborative: everything Maddocks is, and everything it intends to be.

Rather than discard two decades of equity, we evolved it. The lines of the old barcode resolve into a new M monogram, evenly connected, integrated and balanced, expressing how every part of the firm works as one. The form also reads as the gnomon of a sundial, the marker that tracks time and progress, connecting today with tomorrow. Stewardship and momentum in a single mark.

Keeping a connection to the past, the typography and colour palette remain the same, but with the addition of a new visual language graphics that resonates with the new brand mark without aping it. A repeated diamond pattern uses gradients to create movement and depth. It looks like scale armour and quilted leather at the same time, expressing ideas of strength and protection as well as security and a human touch. With dark and light versions, it a flexible easy to use system.

Services As part of the rebrand process, Truly Deeply provided Maddocks with a brand & market review, stakeholder consultation, brand strategy, brand identity design, video production, collateral design, guidelines, marketing templates, presentation templates and cultural tools.

About Maddocks A leading Australian law firm, Maddocks acts for government and corporate clients from Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. Specialist teams, deep sector expertise and an intimate understanding of Australia’s commercial, government and regulatory landscapes make the firm a first call for complex, high-stakes work. Founded in 1885, Maddocks has spent 140 years staying ahead of its industry rather than settling into it. That innovative spirit still drives the value and service it delivers for clients.

The most expensive line on a rebrand invoice could the one that never appears on it.

It isn’t the strategy, the identity system or the rollout. It’s the brand equity you quietly throw away the moment you retire the colour, the symbol or the shape that customers were using to find you. You can’t see it on the invoice. You see it later, in a recognition dip, a flat quarter, a competitor who suddenly looks more familiar than you do.

Rebrands fail in public for all sorts of reasons. The most common one, and the least understood, is this: in the rush to look new, brands erase the very things that made them easy to choose.

What you are actually risking

The assets in question have a name.

Distinctive brand assets are the non-name cues that trigger your brand in a buyer’s memory: a colour, a logo, a shape, a character, a sound, a tagline, a typeface. Think of the Cadbury purple, the Toblerone triangle, or the ‘da dum’ when you turn on Netflix. None of them is the brand name, yet each one summons the brand instantly.

This isn’t an aesthetic idea. It’s a measurable one. It been mapped most rigorously by Professor Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Adelaide, whose work underpins much of how serious marketers think about distinctiveness today. Their finding, put simply: these cues are memory structures, built through years of consistent exposure, and they are what let a buyer recognise and choose you quickly, often before they consciously weigh you against anyone else.

It’s worth being precise here, because the terms get muddled. Distinctiveness is not the same as differentiation. Differentiation is about being different on paper, a better proposition, a sharper position. Distinctiveness is about being recognisable in the moment of choice. You can win the first and still lose the second, and it is the second that a careless rebrand puts at risk. This applies well beyond supermarket shelves, too. A professional services firm’s colour, name, typographic style and tone are distinctive assets exactly as a soft drink’s packaging is. The category changes. The principle does not.

Why rebrands keep destroying them

If distinctive assets are so valuable, why do capable teams keep discarding them? Usually for reasons that feel entirely sensible in the room.

A new leader arrives and wants a mark of their own. The team has grown tired of the current identity, forgetting that you get sick of your own assets years before your market even notices them. Someone decides the brand looks dated, and quietly mistakes “familiar” for “old.” And underneath all of it sits the single most expensive assumption in branding: that a rebrand is a fresh start, a blank page, a chance to begin again.

It is not. A rebrand is an act of evolution performed on an asset that already carries value, and treating it as a reset throws that value away.

The cautionary tales are famous for a reason.

In 2009 Tropicana replaced the orange-and-straw image that shoppers used to spot it on the shelf with a generic glass of juice. Within two months sales had fallen by around 20%, a loss estimated near thirty million dollars, and the company reversed the change. Remarkably, it came close to repeating the mistake in 2024 with another redesign that drew the same backlash. The lesson did not stick, which tells you how strong the pull toward “new” really is.

Jaguar offers a more complicated and recent example. When the brand dropped its leaping-cat heritage for a minimalist identity and a campaign that showed no cars, European sales collapsed in early 2025. Some of that fall reflected a deliberate production halt rather than the rebrand itself, so the simple “the logo killed it” story is too neat. But the strategic gamble is real: Jaguar walked away from the cues its existing buyers recognised, betting that new, unfamiliar audiences would more than replace them. Awareness rose. Whether unfamiliarity converts into sales is the open question, and it is a very expensive question to have left open.

Before you touch anything, know what you own

The discipline that prevents these mistakes is unglamorous and almost always skipped. Before changing a single element, audit what you actually own in your customers’ minds.

A useful tool for this is Romaniuk’s Distinctive Asset Grid, which scores each of your brand cues on two axes. Fame is how many people in your market link the asset to your brand. Uniqueness is how exclusively it points to you rather than a competitor. A rough working standard is 50% on both. Crucially, you test this unprompted, showing people the asset without the name, because the moment you lead the witness your assets look far stronger than they are.

Every cue then lands in one of four positions, and each carries a clear instruction.

• Use or lose. Famous and unique. These are your crown jewels, the cues that can stand in for your name entirely. In a rebrand, you touch these last, if at all.
• Invest. Unique but not yet famous. High-potential assets that simply need more time and exposure. These are the ones brands kill too early, abandoning them right before they would have paid off.
• Shared. Famous but not unique. Recognisable, but pointing to the whole category rather than to you. Think of the interchangeable sage-green palettes of wellness brands, or the identical clean sans-serifs of tech. Familiar, and forgettable.
• Test or ignore. Weak on both. New or simply not working. This is the genuinely safe territory to rework.

Run this audit and the rebrand brief rewrites itself, because now you can see which changes are free and which ones are quietly setting fire to equity.

This is exactly the discipline a Brand Assets and Equity Review is built to provide, and at Truly Deeply it is the step we recommend before any major rebrand begins. Rather than trusting the room’s instincts about what matters, the review maps what your brand actually owns in the minds of the people who buy from you: which cues carry recognition, which carry real value, and which are quietly doing nothing at all. It turns the rebrand brief from a question of taste into a question of evidence, so you change what is safe to change and protect what would be costly to lose. It is the difference between evolving from a position of strength and gambling with equity you never properly measured.

The decision rule: preserve, evolve, retire

With the grid in front of you, the rebrand decision becomes far less a matter of taste and far more a matter of evidence.

Preserve the use-or-lose assets. Carry them across the rebrand untouched, or close to it, even if the team is bored of them. Evolve the high-potential and shared assets deliberately, strengthening what is nearly yours and reworking what points to the category. Retire only what tests genuinely weak.

The classic failure is doing the exact reverse: keeping the generic logo because leadership is attached to it, and binning the one strange, vivid, unmistakable thing the market actually remembers you by. Personal preference in the boardroom is not a measure of brand value. The grid is.

How to evolve without erasing

Protecting equity does not mean freezing the brand. It means changing it the way a careful surgeon operates, not the way a demolition crew works.

Bridge rather than cut. Hold one or two hero assets constant while everything else shifts, so the new brand connects visibly to the one buyers already know. Stage the change rather than detonating it all at once, which gives recognition time to transfer. Test before you commit, using simple unbranded recognition checks to see whether people still find you. And then, the least exciting and most important instruction of all: be consistent, relentlessly, for years. The memory structures you are protecting were built by repetition, and the clock resets every time you chop and change.

None of this is an argument for timidity. Distinctive does not mean dated, and consistent does not mean boring. The most distinctive brands on earth are also among the most creative. They have simply understood the difference between the things they are free to reinvent and the few things they must never surrender.

When a clean break is the right call

Everything above defends the equity you have built. But it would be dishonest to pretend a clean break is never the right answer, because sometimes it plainly is. The discipline is not “never change everything.” It is “never change everything by accident.”

There situations where starting over is the sound, evidence-led decision rather than the reckless one.

The first is when your equity has turned negative, when the associations attached to your name are working against you. After a serious reputational hit, or when a brand is fused to a past it needs to leave behind, recognition becomes a liability, not an asset, and the goal shifts from preserving memory to replacing it.

The second is when you are genuinely a different business: a merger, a pivot or a move into a new market can leave the old brand describing a company that no longer exists, and carrying the old cues forward would only mislead the people you now want to reach.

The third is the quietest of all, and the audit reveals it. When your assets test weak on both fame and uniqueness across the board, there is simply little equity to protect, and a bold, genuinely new identity becomes the faster path rather than the destructive one. To these you can add the forced cases, where a lost trademark or a separation from a parent company makes a new name non-negotiable.

The thread running through all of them is the same one running through this whole piece. A clean break should be a conclusion you arrive at from evidence, not a reflex you reach for out of boredom or a new leader’s appetite for change. And even when the decision is right, go in with your eyes open. Starting over means choosing to spend years rebuilding recognition from nothing, and that cost should be named, budgeted and deliberate, not discovered in a flat quarter eighteen months later. The grid is what tells you which conversation you are actually in: whether you have equity worth defending, or a blank slate worth using.

The real test

If you are rebranding to build on what you have, the aim is to strengthen memory, not reset it. The goal is not a completely new brand. It is a stronger one.

The businesses that come out of a rebrand ahead are the ones that knew exactly what they owned before they changed a thing, protected it on purpose, and let everything else evolve around it. The ones that come out behind are the ones who confused looking new with being better, and paid for the difference in a currency that never showed up on the quote.

Know what you own. Then decide, with evidence, what to protect, what to evolve, and what to let go. Sometimes that means a clean break, taken on purpose and with the cost in full view. What you never want is to erase by accident, and find out too late what it was worth.

Michael Hughes

Michael is Managing Partner and Strategy Director at Truly Deeply.

Truly Deeply is a Melbourne brand strategy and creative agency. When rebranding, we recommend starting with a Brand Assets and Equity Review, so you know exactly what you own before you change a thing, and evolve without losing the equity that makes you worth choosing.

Want to find out more? Contact us.

Creating a comfort-first continence brand from a blank page, designed to feel premium, human and anything but clinical.

Some categories have stood still for so long that the people in them stop expecting anything better. Adult continence is one of them.

For a founder launching into that space, the opportunity was not to add another product to the shelf, but to build a brand that finally treated its wearers with dignity. Truly Deeply worked with Svelte from the ground up, across market review, strategy, naming, identity and packaging, to do exactly that.

A category that forgot its wearers

Incontinence affects around 25 to 30 per cent of the population. It is most common in women, particularly after childbirth, but it reaches people of every age, including those living with chronic illness or disability. Despite that reach, most products remain bulky and uncomfortable, and the packaging tends to add shame to an already private purchase.

Outdated branding has narrowed the category to a single, ageing stereotype, leaving the many people who need a better solution unable to see themselves in anything on offer. That gap was the opening for Svelte, and Truly Deeply treated it with real care. As founder Liz Anieto puts it, the team “took the time to understand the sensitivity of the continence category, the competitive landscape and the opportunity to create something more dignified, premium and human.”

Strategy before anything else

For a startup, the brand strategy is the foundation everything else is built on, so it came first.

Working closely with Liz Anieto, Svelte founder, Truly Deeply anchored the brand in a single essence: fearless freedom. It is an aspirational, motivating idea that speaks to the audience’s desire to live without limits, supported by a plain-spoken promise of comfort you forget you are wearing. From there came a full strategic framework, spanning brand beliefs and values, a brand story, positioning, messaging and personality.

For a new business, this is the toolkit that guides, protects and grows the brand long after launch. It was careful, considered work, with a team Anieto describes as approaching the project “with care, patience and real strategic depth.”

Distinctive and elegant, from the name down

Svelte signals elegance before you read a word of copy. It carries connotations of sleekness, grace and quiet confidence, telling the wearer that a continence product can be flattering rather than bulky or clinical. It respects the wearer and it builds instant memorability, the kind of clarity a startup needs when it has one chance to make a first impression.

To make the name an asset the business could own and defend, we worked with our IP legal partner to conduct comprehensive trademark searches and guide the name through registration.

Design that feels barely there

The identity is simple, refined and sophisticated. It is built around a beautifully crafted wordmark that expresses lightness and comfort, layered onto a visual language inspired by the thin, barely-there layers that wrap around the wearer. A rich, gentle palette of muted navy, premium neutrals and subtle accents of colour adds depth without distraction. Together, the wordmark, the layers and the colour form a restrained, considered and luxurious identity and packaging system, one that looks at home in a premium space rather than hidden at the back of a shelf.

The measure of a new brand is whether it feels like it belongs, and whether the founder believes in what they have made. On both counts, Svelte delivers. The brand “now feels beautiful, considered and very different from what currently exists in the category,” says Anieto, who is proud of what was built together and recommends Truly Deeply “without hesitation.”

Services Market review, brand strategy, naming, brand identity design, packaging design and production.

About Svelte Svelte is a new comfort-first pull-up continence underwear. Designed in Australia and crafted in Japan, it is fully breathable, soft and premium, made to feel lighter and less bulky than traditional continence products. Svelte brings a long-overdue rethink to a category that has ignored its wearers for too long.

One of the causes of this was the success of Community Independents or Teals in what used to be traditional Liberal seats. The Teals, aptly named from using a colour that is a mix of Blue (Liberals) and the Green(s). This week saw the launch of what the press has been calling the Teal Party. Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall have announced their new political organisation called Community Strong Australia (It’s too small to be a Party).

In politics, as with all things, you get one first impression. The girls have blown it. While the strategy, values and messaging seems to be in the right place the naming and identity is weak, to say the least.

A name should be memorable, easy to say, easy to own and most importantly differentiated. Community Strong Australia is none of these things. Even shortening it to Community Strong, which I assume is what they will do, doesn’t help. It sounds like a local council group or a charity org. There’s already charities and community programs out there called or using the term Community Strong. It might make sense for them, but here it’s pretty low-fi. It’s a terrible word salad, that ticks woke boxes while meaning little. Did no-one check what CSA might mean? And Aussies shorten everything to a couple of syllables, Comms or Commies anyone?

Then there the icon and colours they have chosen. Where’s the teal? A strong shift to the last edges of aqua maybe. Ah, I get it, we’re centrists, the white woke in the sandwich between the red left and the blue right. But the charity hand, begging for donations or is the dirty politician looking for someone to grease their palms? There may be a speech bubble in there, we’re about grassroots conversations, we’re about community. Is it the red sun rising over the buried undead or the right? And it’s a heart, that’s taken a tumble.

It seems a missed opportunity to not grab and own the Teal name and colour. It’s what they’re known as anyway. Every single article has referred to them as the Teal Party. If the media wants to help that much, let them (God knows it’s working for Pauline). It’s used as a slur against other country independents by the right. That’s how much power it has. It’s a great name and it’s sitting there waiting for someone to own it.

Your next client doesn’t search the way they used to. They ask Google or ChatGPT, “Who are the best firms for this in Australia?”

What comes back isn’t a page of blue links. It’s a confident, conversational recommendation that names three firms and says why each is worth considering.

If your brand is one of the three, you’ve just been handed an endorsement no paid ad could buy.

If it isn’t, you weren’t beaten on price, capability or pitch. You simply weren’t in the room, and you’ll likely never know the opportunity existed.

This is the new shortlist. And the uncomfortable truth for most brand owners is that the rules for getting onto it have very little to do with the tactics currently being sold to you.

The shift is already underway

The numbers are moving faster than most boards realise. ChatGPT is past 800 million weekly users. Google’s AI Overviews now appear on a meaningful and rising share of all searches.

Across the B2B world, the change is sharper still: research suggests the overwhelming majority of business buyers now use generative AI somewhere in their vendor research, and most say they trust the recommendations it gives them.

Here’s the part that should make you sit up. The overlap between the brands ranking on Google’s first page and the brands being cited inside AI answers has, by some estimates, collapsed from around 70% to under 20%. In other words, the work you’ve done to rank on Google does not automatically carry you into the AI answer. These are becoming two different games, and a lot of well-optimised firms are about to discover they’re invisible in the one that’s growing.

Why most of the advice you’re getting misses the point

A whole industry has sprung up overnight to sell you the fix.

It has a name, Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, and it usually arrives as a technical checklist: restructure your content, add schema, fix your robots.txt, write in extractable chunks, chase citations.

None of that is wrong. But almost all of it treats AI visibility as a plumbing problem. It isn’t. It’s a branding problem wearing a technical disguise.

Strip away the jargon and ask what an AI engine is actually doing when it recommends a firm. It is trying to answer a human question with the most credible, relevant, well-understood options it can find. To do that, it has to be able to recognise what your brand is, who it’s for, what it’s known for, and whether anyone other than you says so. Those aren’t optimisation settings. They’re the four questions brand strategy has always existed to answer.

The brands that win in AI search are not the ones that gamed the format. They’re the ones the machine can understand clearly and corroborate confidently, because they were built that way.

How AI actually decides who to recommend

It helps to understand, in plain language, what’s happening under the bonnet.

When someone asks an AI a question, the model doesn’t simply paste it into a search box. It breaks the question into smaller sub-questions, gathers passages from across the web, and assembles an answer from sources it judges clear, relevant and trustworthy. Your brand can appear in that answer as a mention, a citation, or both.

Whether you make the cut comes down to a handful of things, and every one of them is a brand fundamental.

1. Can it tell what you are?
   AI models work with entities: distinct, recognisable “things” they understand. A firm with a sharp, consistently described proposition and identity is an entity the model can confidently place in a category and recommend. A firm that describes itself differently in every channel, hedges on what it does, or hides behind clever-but-vague language is a blur. Blurs don’t get recommended.
2. Are you connected to the right buying triggers?
   Clients don’t enter a category in the abstract. They arrive with a specific need: we’re expanding into a new market, we’ve outgrown our name, our category is being disrupted. The firms that surface are the ones reliably associated with those moments. This is the science of category entry points, and it maps directly onto how AI assembles an answer: the more clearly you’re linked to the situations clients describe, the more often you’re the answer.
3. Does anyone else vouch for you?
   This is where most firms come undone. A brand described only on its own website and a few low-authority blogs gives the model nothing to corroborate. AI engines lean heavily on third-party signals: earned media, reviews, expert commentary, conversations in places like LinkedIn and industry communities. Being talked about matters more than what you say about yourself. You cannot self-describe your way into an AI recommendation.
4. Are you distinctive, or are you wallpaper?
   This is the quiet killer. Generative models are, by design, machines that produce the average. Feed them a category full of firms that all say “trusted,” “innovative,” “client-focused” and “end-to-end,” and they will blend you into an indistinguishable paste. The firms that get named are the ones with a genuinely different position and distinctive assets the model can latch onto. In a sea of AI sameness, distinctiveness isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the thing that makes you legible.

The strategic payoff: AI rewards companies that invest in their brand

Notice what’s happened here. Entity clarity, strong category associations, third-party credibility, distinctiveness: these are not new demands invented by AI. They are the timeless markers of a well-built brand. AI search has simply turned them into a visibility mechanism with immediate commercial consequences.

There’s good evidence the market is already swinging back this way. McKinsey’s most recent research has CMOs naming brand as their number one priority, precisely because it creates distinctiveness and a clear value proposition. Kantar’s analysis of billions of data points found that brands seen as meaningfully different command several times the penetration of those that aren’t, and are far better placed to be surfaced, and chosen, in AI-mediated discovery. The machine, it turns out, has the same taste as the market. It rewards brands that are clear about who they are and meaningfully different from the pack.

Which means the firms most exposed by AI search are the vague ones, the “me-too” players who survived on being findable rather than being distinct. For them, this is a reckoning. For firms willing to do the strategic work, it’s the best argument in years for investing in brand properly.

How do you win in the AI world?

Resist the urge to hand this to your SEO team as a technical task. The highest-leverage moves are brand decisions.

Start by sharpening your entity. Be able to state, in one unambiguous sentence, what category you’re in, who you’re for and what you’re known for, then say it consistently everywhere your brand appears. Inconsistency is the enemy; a model that sees three different versions of you trusts none of them.

Get deliberate about the buying triggers you want to own. Map the real situations that bring clients into your category and make sure your brand is clearly and repeatedly connected to them, in your own content and, ideally, in others’. You’re building the associations the model will reach for when those situations come up in a prompt.

Then earn your way off your own website. Prioritise the third-party presence that gives AI something to corroborate: earned media, genuine reviews and case evidence, expert commentary, and a real voice in the communities and platforms your clients, and the models, pay attention to. A brand that others describe consistently is a brand AI can recommend with confidence.

And protect your distinctiveness fiercely. Keep your distinctive assets and your position consistent, and refuse the temptation to sand off the edges that make you recognisable. The pressure to optimise for the machine will quietly push you toward the category average. The firms that resist it will be the ones the machine can actually see.

Finally, measure it. The same way you’ve long tracked awareness and consideration, start tracking your presence in AI answers: your “share of model” across the prompts your prospective clients are actually using. You can’t manage a shortlist you never look at.

The key takeaway

It would be easy to read all this as a brand-new discipline demanding a brand-new playbook. It isn’t. AI search hasn’t changed what makes a brand strong. It has changed the stakes, and the speed, of getting it wrong.

The firms that get recommended by AI will be the ones that were already clear, already distinctive, already talked about for the right reasons. The technical work has its place, but it’s downstream. Upstream is the only question that’s ever really mattered: when someone in your category goes looking, whether they ask a colleague, a search engine, or a machine, is yours the firm worth naming?

Get that right, and AI becomes one more place your brand gets chosen. Get it wrong, and it becomes one more room you were never in.

Michael Hughes

Michael is Managing Partner and Strategy Director at Truly Deeply. Michael is passionate about helping businesses tell a compelling and authentic brand story so they can become distinctive enough to be chosen, by clients and by the machines they ask.

Want to find out more? Contact us.

Brand strategy, naming and identity for Keyek, the identity assurance authority for government, defence and enterprise.

Keyek delivers indisputable proof of identity: certain, unified and enterprise-wide, built for the demands of the most complex organisations.

A change in ownership and a bold new vision created the opportunity to signal a genuine fresh start for clients and employees alike. The business needed a brand that matched its ambition and could carry a compelling new direction, both externally and internally.

A clear vision, settled first

Working closely with the leadership team, we aligned the business and brand around a clear new vision: a world where identity is indisputable, and where that certainty frees everyone to do more, share more and build more.

The brand promise, Identity. Certain. Enterprise-wide, became a powerful anchor for a complete brand strategy spanning vision, mission, values, beliefs, brand story, messaging and personality. We also simplified the brand architecture, consolidating a suite of product brands into one unified, authoritative identity.

A name that proves the point

Keyek is a created palindrome built around the word ‘key’, the universal symbol of access, authentication and security. The name places the brand directly in its category, with immediate legibility for enterprise technology buyers.

At five letters it is compact, visually distinctive and phonetically clean. Its palindromic structure adds an intellectual dimension fitting for a platform that proves identity is the same entity, verified from every direction. Embedded at its centre is ‘eye’, reinforcing the brand’s role in seeing what is often unseen and protecting identity at every layer.

To make the name an asset the business could own, we partnered with IP legal professionals to conduct comprehensive trademark searches and guide the name through registration.

Design that mirrors the technology

The identity is expressed as a strong, bold custom wordmark that brings the palindromic name to life. Opening and closing with exaggerated, distinctive Ks, the letterforms mirror each other in angle and rhythm, reflecting the parallel and reflective nature of the technology itself.

At the centre, the Y features a multilayered, three dimensional element and a gradient that illuminates the word KEY within the name, a nod to the dual-key nature of the platform. The colour palette is digital first, drawing on the CRT console heritage of computing, with an RGB lime as the hero colour that signals military-grade technical precision.

A brand built to perform

A rebrand earns its keep in the room, in the way leaders talk about the business and the way customers understand it. For Keyek, the new positioning gave the team a sharper, more effective way to articulate complex technology.

As part of the branding process, Truly Deeply provided Keyek with a competive review, brand strategy, naming, brand identity design, brand assets, templates and collateral design.

Keyek is the identity assurance authority for government, defence and enterprise. The company delivers indisputable proof of identity that is certain, unified and enterprise-wide. Built for the demands of the most complex organisations, Keyek ensures identity is verified, protected and trusted for everyone, everything, everywhere, every day.

The forces reshaping how business buyers discover, evaluate, and choose. What it means for your brand strategy.

For a long time, many professional services firms and B2B organisations operated on a comfortable assumption: that brand was something consumer companies worried about. That expertise, reputation, and relationships were sufficient to drive growth. That a decent website and a consistent logo were enough.

That assumption is no longer safe. In 2026, the professional services and B2B landscape has shifted in ways that make strong, strategic brand investment not merely useful, but commercially essential.

The firms that understand this are pulling ahead. Those that don’t are increasingly difficult to distinguish from their competitors, regardless of how good their work actually is.

At Truly Deeply, we have worked with professional services firms, B2B companies, financial services businesses, industry associations, and corporate organisations across Australia and beyond for decades. This is what we see happening right now, and what it means for leaders considering their brand strategy.

The business case for brand investment has never been stronger

Let us start with the numbers, because in professional services, the conversation about brand investment often stalls at budget approval. Leaders want to know: what is this actually worth to the business?

The evidence is substantial. Research consistently shows that strong brands in professional services and B2B markets command premium pricing of between 10 and 30 per cent over weaker competitors. They achieve lower customer acquisition costs through stronger referral rates and organic discovery. They attract better talent, reducing recruitment spend and time-to-hire. And they convert more of the prospects they do reach, because buyers who already understand and trust your brand arrive with confidence rather than scepticism.

That last figure deserves particular attention. Research from B2B International confirms that only around five per cent of your potential clients are actively looking to buy at any point. The other 95 per cent are not in market yet, but they will be. The brands that are present, memorable, and positively perceived when those buyers eventually enter the market are the ones that get shortlisted without ever having to fight for it. Brand is not a marketing cost. It is a long-term commercial investment that compounds over time.

For professional services firms specifically, the professional services industry is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 5.37 per cent through to 2029. That growth creates both opportunity and risk. A rising tide lifts all boats, but it also raises expectations. Clients have more choice, are better informed, and are more willing to switch providers than ever before. The firms that will capture disproportionate growth from this expanding market are those with brand equity to spare.

Brand is no longer a marketing asset. In 2026, it is the commercial spine that holds everything together. With so much of the buyer journey now happening before a salesperson is ever involved, your brand is your most important business development tool.

The forces making Brand more critical than ever

Several significant shifts are converging to make brand strategy a board-level priority for professional services and B2B organisations right now.

Taken together, these forces mean that professional services and B2B firms can no longer rely on their networks and word of mouth to do all the heavy lifting. Brand must work harder, across more channels, and for an audience that is increasingly sophisticated in how it evaluates and selects providers.

The trap professional services firms fall Into

Ask almost any professional services firm or B2B organisation why they have not invested seriously in their brand, and you will hear a familiar set of responses. “We grow through referrals.” “Our clients know us.” “Our work speaks for itself.” “Brand is more of a consumer thing.” Sometimes: “We tried a rebrand once and it was mostly about the logo.”

These are not unreasonable observations. They just describe a past that is becoming increasingly less reliable as a guide to the future. Referral networks have a ceiling. The clients who know you will not always be in market. The decision-makers at your best clients change over time. And the competitors who are investing in their brand are making it easier and easier to switch.

The deeper issue is that many professional services and B2B organisations have never formally articulated what makes them genuinely different. They have a set of values on a website page, a tagline that sounds like every other firm in their sector, and a visual identity that has gradually accumulated inconsistencies over years of decentralised use. When pressed, their differentiation tends to be expressed through credentials, process, or service quality — all of which are claimed just as credibly by every competitor in the market.

A strong brand does not replace expertise or relationships. It amplifies them. It gives your firm a clear and compelling reason to be chosen that exists before any conversation with a salesperson or business development partner has taken place.

The common triggers we see

Professional services and B2B firms typically arrive at a brand conversation for one of several reasons: the business has grown or evolved beyond what the current brand represents; a merger, acquisition, or leadership change has created a need for a fresh strategic platform; the firm is entering new markets or targeting new client segments; talent attraction has become a significant challenge; or the brand simply feels dated and is no longer doing the firm justice in a competitive pitch.

Brand Strategy, not just Brand Identity

This is perhaps the most important distinction for any professional services or B2B leader to understand before embarking on a brand project. Brand strategy and brand identity are not the same thing, and the most expensive mistake an organisation can make is to invest in the latter without doing the former.

Brand strategy is about defining who you are, what you stand for, how you are genuinely different, and why that matters to the clients and talent you are trying to attract. It requires honest research, stakeholder consultation, and the discipline to make real choices about positioning. It produces a brand proposition that is compelling, differentiated, and authentically grounded in the organisation’s actual strengths and culture.

Brand identity — the visual language, the naming, the logo, the design system — is the expression of that strategy. A new visual identity without a strategic foundation underneath it will look different, but not be different. And within months, the organisation will revert to communicating in the same undifferentiated ways as before, because there is nothing clear and compelling driving the communication.

The professional services and B2B firms that get the most from their brand investment are the ones that treat brand strategy as a genuine business priority, not a creative project delegated to marketing.

Case Study

Wotton Kearney — Rebranding Asia Pacific’s leading insurance law firm

Founded in 2002, Wotton Kearney had grown from two partners to 86 partners and more than 700 team members across offices in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. But as the firm’s capabilities expanded well beyond its original insurance law specialism into emerging risks, innovation, AI, and Asia, the brand had not kept pace with the business it had become. Truly Deeply consulted with the firm across Asia Pacific through workshops, surveys, and sessions with firm leaders and cultural champions to understand what WK truly meant to its clients and people. The resulting brand essence — big thinkers, trail blazers, impactful humans — captures the firm’s culture of solving complex challenges, its commitment to innovation, and its global ambitions. A bold monogram identity, anchored by forward-moving chevron elements, gave visual form to an organisation that had genuinely outgrown its previous brand.

Read the full case study →

Differentiation is everything when everyone claims the same

Professional services and B2B markets are, almost without exception, crowded with firms making very similar claims. Every law firm promises client-centred service and deep expertise. Every consulting firm offers strategic insight and measurable outcomes. Every financial services business talks about trust, partnership, and long-term thinking. Every industry association exists to advocate for its members and strengthen the sector.

When the category language is that uniform, winning the right clients becomes almost entirely a function of price, timing, and who the buyer happened to hear about most recently. None of those are positions of strength.

The brands that break out of this pattern do so not by making louder versions of the same claims, but by finding a genuinely distinctive point of view. This usually requires looking inward before looking outward — understanding what the organisation’s people actually believe, how they actually work, and what the clients who value them most actually value about the relationship. That distinctive truth, properly articulated and consistently expressed, is the foundation of a brand that commands attention and commands premium pricing.

Case Study

Arca — Rebranding Australia’s leading credit industry association

Arca is the industry association that brings together Australia’s leading credit providers and reporting bodies. Despite delivering genuine value to its members, the brand was widely perceived as limited in reach, confusing to external audiences, and underselling its influence and expertise. Research identified that the organisation’s people and performance were its strongest assets, but the brand was failing to reflect them. Truly Deeply developed a new strategic proposition built around the idea of “together for credit confidence” — a positioning that captured Arca’s genuine differentiator: the unifying, collaborative role it plays in a complex industry landscape. The brand name was simplified from its full title to Arca, written in title case, and a new brand architecture was developed to bring greater clarity to the organisation’s consumer-facing Credit Smart service.

Read the full case study →

Case Study

Foresters Financial, A 175-year-old brand transformed for growth

Foresters Financial has been generating wealth for clients since 1849, but the brand had remained largely focused on its traditional funeral investment bond audience, limiting its appeal and commercial growth potential. With a new business strategy and ambitious targets for reaching a much broader investor market, the organisation needed a brand transformation to match. Partnering with the leadership team and Board, Truly Deeply developed a new strategic brand proposition anchored in the promise of “empowering prosperity, protecting legacies.” This leveraged the brand’s extraordinary heritage while firmly repositioning it for contemporary audiences. A new visual identity reimagined the original crest and stag horn iconography of the 1849 founders in a sophisticated, forward-looking mark that speaks to both history and ambition.

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When your Brand is holding the business back

One of the most valuable things a brand audit can reveal is the gap between how an organisation sees itself and how its clients, prospects, and potential employees actually perceive it. In professional services and B2B markets, this gap is often wider than leaders expect, and it is almost always costing the business.

A brand that is perceived as dated creates doubt about the organisation’s relevance and forward-thinking capability. A brand that is misunderstood or poorly differentiated means that even satisfied clients struggle to describe why they chose you, making referrals less frequent and less targeted. A brand that fails to attract the right talent increases recruitment costs and cultural drift. And a brand that does not accurately represent the full scope of the organisation’s capabilities will consistently miss cross-selling and new market opportunities.

The Spective case is instructive here. A business does not need to be failing to need a new brand. It just needs its brand to be telling the wrong story.

Brand Architecture for complex professional services organisations

Many professional services and B2B firms carry complexity that goes beyond a single brand. Multi-disciplinary practices, firms with distinct product lines or service divisions, and organisations that have grown through acquisition often face a brand architecture challenge before they can tackle positioning and identity.

The question is not just “what should we look like?” It is “how do our different offerings, divisions, or acquired businesses relate to each other under a coherent brand structure?” Getting this wrong leads to confusion in the market, internal inconsistency, and fragmented client experience. Getting it right creates a brand ecosystem where the parts reinforce each other and the whole is greater than the sum.

For B2B organisations navigating mergers, acquisitions, or significant expansion, brand architecture strategy is often the most consequential decision in the entire rebrand. It shapes every communication decision that follows for years to come.

Case Study

Vinyl Group — Building a unified and scalable brand from merged businesses

When three separate music technology businesses — Vampr, Jaxsta, and Vinyl.com — merged in 2023, the new entity faced a challenge familiar to many B2B organisations after M&A activity: how to protect and leverage the equity in three existing brands while creating something coherent and commercially compelling as a group. Truly Deeply worked with the ownership team to develop a brand architecture strategy, a new group brand name, a strategic proposition, and a visual identity system that united the three businesses without erasing their individual identities. The Vinyl Group brand, built around the purpose of “being the heartbeat of an equitable music world,” gave investors, industry partners, and users a clear and compelling reason for the combination to exist.

Read the full case study →

Brand as a platform for growth, capital, and talent

For B2B organisations at an earlier or more dynamic stage of growth — scale-ups, private equity-backed businesses, and challenger firms entering established markets — brand is not just a communications tool. It is a growth platform and a signal of credibility to the capital markets, commercial partners, and senior talent that the business needs to attract.

In private equity and investment, brand clarity is increasingly recognised as a value driver. A well-articulated brand proposition gives investors confidence in the business model, the management team’s clarity of vision, and the organisation’s ability to execute. It also accelerates the commercial momentum that justifies valuation.

Similarly, in competitive talent markets where the best people have choices, a compelling employer brand is inseparable from the overall organisational brand. The professional services and B2B firms that are winning the war for talent in 2026 are those that can articulate not just what they do, but why it matters, what working there actually feels like, and what values drive the organisation day to day.

Case Study

Straight Bat — Branding a new-breed private equity fund from the ground up

Straight Bat is a private equity fund with a genuinely differentiated model: long-game investing focused on family-owned businesses, enabling founders to achieve a smooth transition while preserving their legacy and realising the returns of a lifetime’s work. In a mature PE market dominated by established incumbents, the brand had to do real commercial work from day one. Truly Deeply worked with the Straight Bat leadership team to translate a distinctive business model into a compelling brand proposition, a unique brand voice and narrative, and a visual identity that was both evocative and strategically appropriate for the firm’s target audience. The resulting brand gave Straight Bat the credibility, clarity, and distinctiveness to compete immediately in a crowded market, without looking or sounding like any of its competitors.

Read the full case study →

What makes a successful professional services rebrand

Drawing on our work across law firms, financial services businesses, industry associations, B2B companies, and corporate organisations, there are clear patterns in the professional services rebrands that deliver lasting commercial results.

Leadership ownership. The most successful rebrands are those where the CEO, managing partner, or managing director is genuinely committed to the process and its outcomes. Brand strategy is a business strategy conversation. It should not be delegated entirely to marketing.

A genuine willingness to differentiate. Many professional services firms start a brand process hoping it will confirm what they already believe about themselves. The organisations that benefit most are those willing to hear uncomfortable truths from their clients, their people, and their market, and then act on what they learn.

Strategy before identity. Investing in a new visual identity without a clear strategic foundation is the most common and costly mistake in professional services branding. The brand identity must express a clear and differentiated proposition. Without one, you are investing in aesthetics, not brand equity.

Internal engagement from the start. In professional services particularly, your people are the brand. Partners, directors, and senior practitioners all have views on what the firm stands for and how it should present itself. Engaging them early creates advocates rather than critics when the new brand is launched.

A commitment to activation. A brand that lives only in a guidelines document is not a brand. The organisations that see the greatest return on brand investment are those that roll it out with commitment, invest in internal culturalisation, and give their people the tools and the conviction to deliver on the new proposition every day.

In 2026, the B2B and professional services firms that stand out are those with a clear and compelling point of view about who they are and why it matters. In markets saturated with AI-generated sameness, authenticity and genuine differentiation are not brand ideals. They are commercial advantages.

Truly Deeply has built and rebranded professional services firms, B2B organisations, financial services businesses, and industry bodies across Australia and internationally. We understand the commercial pressures, the stakeholder complexity, and the culture of organisations where expertise and relationships sit at the heart of the business model.

If your brand is not doing justice to your organisation’s capabilities, or you are at a strategic inflection point that demands a rethink, we would welcome the conversation.

Let’s talk about your brand.

We’d be happy to work through your challenges, explore your opportunities, and recommend the best path forward for your organisation.

Get in touch with Truly Deeply

Michael Hughes

Michael is Managing Partner and Strategy Director at Truly Deeply. His deep expertise is building stakeholder alignment, unlocking insights, and defining the strategic power of your brand to create a differentiated, compelling, and authentic brand proposition that will engage all your audiences and drive your business growth. Michael has extensive experience working with leading Australian and International organisations across just about every sector.

References

1. Lucidpress and Demand Metric, The Impact of Brand Consistency.
2. McKinsey, B2B Business Branding.
3. B2B International, 9 Trends That Will Shape B2B Brands in 2026.

Why healthcare rebranding is more complex and more consequential than in almost any other industry.

If you’re a Marketing, Communications or Business leader in the health sector who’s been asking “is now the right time to rebrand?”, you’re in good company. The health and medical industry is in the middle of a sustained period of change, and brand is increasingly being recognised as a critical strategic lever, not just a cosmetic one.

At Truly Deeply, we’ve spent years working with some of Australia’s most significant health and medical organisations. Our experience includes national hospital networks and health insurers to regulatory bodies, educators and healthcare providers. In every case, the organisations that achieve the most from a rebrand are those that approach it with clarity, commitment, and a deep understanding of what makes healthcare branding uniquely challenging.

This is what we’ve learned.

Why healthcare organisations are rebranding now

The Australian health and medical sector has changed dramatically in recent years. Consumer expectations have shifted. Patients, members and clients are more informed, more discerning and more likely to compare their options. Regulatory environments have evolved. Mergers, expansions and new service models have left many organisations with brands that no longer accurately reflect who they are or what they stand for.

At the same time, competition for talent has intensified. In a sector where the ability to attract, retain and inspire skilled professionals can literally affect the quality of care, employer brand has become inseparable from organisational brand.

Add to this the proliferation of health-adjacent services, digital health platforms and private providers entering traditional spaces, and you have a landscape where standing still on brand is no longer neutral. It’s a slow erosion of relevance.

In our experience, the most common triggers for a healthcare rebrand are: a dated brand that no longer reflects the organisation’s strategic direction; inconsistent or fragmented brand expression across services or sites; a significant change in service scope or audience; the need to attract talent or new funding; or a merger, acquisition or alliance that requires a rethought brand architecture.

Start with the “Why”, not the logo

The most important question before any rebrand is deceptively simple: why are we doing this?

It may seem obvious, but in the health sector particularly, it’s easy for a rebrand conversation to get captured by surface-level concerns. The logo looks dated, a colour palette that feels too clinical or collateral that’s inconsistent.

Those things may well need addressing. But a successful rebrand in health and medicine is grounded in strategy, not aesthetics. Before committing to a new visual identity, leadership teams need to achieve genuine alignment on the organisation’s future direction, its core purpose, and what needs to change. Not just what needs to look different.

A rebrand won’t solve a cultural problem. It won’t fix a misalignment between your stated values and how staff experience working there. And it won’t close the gap between the promise you’re making to patients or clients and the experience you’re actually delivering.

In fact, a shiny new brand applied over unresolved issues will only make those issues more visible. Brand is a lens that magnifies what’s already there.

A rebrand isn’t a quick fix and won’t solve fundamental issues with your service or endemic cultural challenges. But when the conditions are right, it can be one of the most powerful strategic tools available to a health organisation.

The unique complexity of health sector rebranding

Rebranding a health or medical organisation is inherently more complex than rebranding a consumer brand or professional services firm. Here’s why:

Multiple, diverse audiences. Where many brands serve a single primary audience, health organisations typically need to communicate clearly with patients or clients, referring practitioners, specialist staff, community partners, funders, regulators and the public, often simultaneously. A rebrand needs to resonate with each of these groups while remaining coherent as a whole.

High-stakes trust. In healthcare, brand trust isn’t just about preference. It’s about confidence in care, safety and expertise. Any change to the brand must reinforce rather than disrupt that trust. A mishandled rebrand can genuinely damage relationships that took decades to build.

Complex stakeholder landscapes. Health organisations often have boards, governing bodies, professional associations, funding partners and community stakeholders who all have legitimate views on the brand. Navigating this requires a disciplined, well-facilitated process. Not a top-down imposition of change.

Regulatory and governance considerations. For regulated health entities in particular, brand language, claims and positioning all need to be considered carefully in the context of legal obligations and professional standards.

Case Study: Ahpra — Unifying a national health regulator

When Australia’s national health practitioner regulation agency came to Truly Deeply, they had a fragmented brand that was actively creating confusion. The main logo had become illegible. It listed every profession the organisation regulated, meaning it needed to change every time a new profession joined. Internal and external stakeholders were unclear on the organisation’s role and authority. Through deep stakeholder research, we identified an opportunity to simplify the brand structure and shift the organisational tone from punitive to positive. The result was a unified brand architecture, a refined masterbrand and consistent identities for the National Boards, each clearly linked to Ahpra.

Read the full case study →

Stakeholder engagement is non-negotiable

In any rebrand, stakeholder engagement is important. In health and medicine, it’s essential. And it’s not enough to consult broadly at the beginning and then present a finished brand at the end. The most successful health rebrands we’ve led have treated consultation as an ongoing thread woven through the entire process.

This serves multiple purposes. It surfaces insights that you simply can’t get from desk research. The nuances of how staff describe the organisation to their family at dinner, the words a patient uses when talking about their experience, the frustrations a referring GP has been carrying for years. These are the critical insights for developing a meaningful brand proposition.

It also builds the internal advocates that any brand launch needs. When your clinical directors, your board members and your frontline team feel heard and reflected in the new brand, they become its champions. When they don’t, they become its quiet saboteurs.

Case Study: VCCC — Uniting partners to overcome Cancer

The Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC) is an alliance of nine of Victoria’s leading cancer research, education and healthcare organisations. This includes Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, The Royal Melbourne Hospital, The University of Melbourne and The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. The challenge wasn’t building a brand from nothing; it was building a brand that could unite nine proud, independent organisations without displacing any of them.

Truly Deeply conducted one-on-one and group sessions with the leadership and marketing teams of all partners, developing a brand proposition that united rather than replaced. The result was a flexible endorsed brand architecture that allowed each partner to communicate their relationship with the VCCC in ways that served their own audiences, while collectively positioning the VCCC as Australia’s foremost comprehensive cancer centre.

Read the full case study →

Build a brand proposition that creates real impact

In an industry where patient safety, clinical excellence and compassionate care are often assumed, genuine differentiation is hard to find. And yet, within any health organisation, there is usually a set of beliefs, values and ways of working that are genuinely distinct. The job of a brand strategy is to surface those things, articulate them with precision, and translate them into a proposition that resonates with all audiences.

In our experience, the most powerful healthcare brand propositions aren’t built around what an organisation does or even how it does it. They’re built around why it exists; the fundamental belief that drives everything. In a sector as meaningful as health and medicine, that ‘why’ is rarely hard to find. The challenge is articulating it in a way that is both emotionally compelling and operationally credible.

Case Study: Baptcare — Creating a meaningful difference

Baptcare is a non-profit faith-based organisation providing a broad range of care, support and residential services, founded in 1945. Operating in an increasingly competitive, consumer-driven market, the Baptcare brand had become dated and inconsistently understood across staff, clients and stakeholders. The challenge was finding a differentiating proposition in a sector where just about every player was making the same promises. Truly Deeply’s research identified a powerful and authentic story at the heart of the organisation. One that had always been there, but had never been clearly expressed. The resulting brand proposition, ‘making a meaningful difference’, united all services and audiences under a single compelling idea, backed by a refreshed visual identity, an Employee Value Proposition and comprehensive messaging guidelines.

Read the full case study →

Case Study: Anmac — A bold step forward for national nursing and midwifery organisation

The Australian Nursing & Midwifery Accreditation Council (Anmac) had a proud history and a well-earned reputation but the brand was dated and no longer reflected the organisation’s ambition. Stakeholder and market research confirmed a clear mandate for change: not just a refresh, but something bold, brave and contemporary. Truly Deeply worked closely with the Board, senior leadership and stakeholders to align the new business strategy with a renewed brand framework. The result included a new vision, purpose, values, brand promise and positioning. This was brought to life with a fresh visual identity built around an ‘A’ mark that carries multiple layers of meaning relevant to accreditation, assessment and achievement. The CEO described the outcome as marking “a clear step forward” that “presents a more proactive and contemporary expression of who we are.”

Read the full case study →

Brand Architecture: Unique challenges facing health brands

Few sectors face the brand architecture complexity that health organisations do. Large hospital networks, multi-service care providers and national health bodies must manage the relationship between an umbrella brand and multiple sub-brands, facility brands, service brands and specialist divisions. Each with their own audiences, equities and communications needs.

Get this wrong and you end up with a brand landscape that is confusing for the public, demoralising for staff and operationally unmanageable for your marketing and communications teams. Get it right, and you have a coherent architecture that allows every part of the organisation to speak with a consistent voice while still communicating what makes each part distinctive.

Case Study: Healthscope — Uniting 42 hospitals under one national brand

Healthscope is Australia’s only national private hospital operator, with a network of 42 hospitals and clinics across every state and territory. A decade of decentralised management had created an inconsistent and fragmented brand identity. Individual hospitals had strong local recognition, but Healthscope as a group brand was largely invisible. However, there was no appetite for a full rebrand given other priorities, and significant equity in local hospital names. Truly Deeply stress-tested multiple brand architecture scenarios with stakeholders before landing on a strategic endorsement model. We added ‘by Healthscope’ to hospital brandmarks which was supported by a ‘OneHealthscope’ internal communications platform and a refreshed visual language for the group. The result: a brand that’s more coherent, more contemporary and more capable of supporting individual hospitals while building collective strength.

Read the full case study →

A rebrand doesn’t always mean a new logo

Yes, we a brand agency that belives that a new logo is not always necessary!

This is one of the most important things we tell health sector leaders at the beginning of any brand engagement. A new logo can be a powerful signal of change and sometimes it’s absolutely the right call. But it also carries significant capital cost (signage, uniforms, collateral, digital assets, wayfinding across multiple sites) and can be unnecessarily disruptive when there is genuine equity in the existing mark.

However, there are many other dimensions of your brand’s visual and verbal expression that can be significantly shifted without touching the logo. Your brand is much more than a logo. The colour palette, typography, imagery style, graphic language, tone of voice and messaging all play an important role in shaping your brand.

With Healthscope, we retained the core brandmark but evolved the broader visual system. This made the brand feel substantially more contemporary and coherent without triggering the complexity (and huge capital expenditure) of a full logo change across 42 sites.

The question to ask isn’t “do we need a new logo?” It’s “what needs to change for our brand to achieve its strategic objectives?” Let the answer to that question determine the scope.

Case Study: GMHBA — Turning heritage into competitive advantage

GMHBA is a not-for-profit health insurer with more than 80 years in the market and strong regional roots. Despite high member satisfaction and loyalty, the brand identity wasn’t keeping pace. Competing against much larger national and multinational funds with significantly bigger marketing budgets, GMHBA needed to find a differentiated position that no large competitor could credibly claim. Truly Deeply’s solution was to lean into what made GMHBA genuinely different: its deep community roots and local commitment. The new brand strategy and identity revitalised the organisation’s heritage, crystallised its community purpose and provided a compelling alternative to the major health funds. This was then launched through an integrated campaign across television, radio, cinema and digital.

Read the full case study →

Your people are the brand

Nowhere is this truer than in healthcare. The experience a patient has, the reassurance a client receives, the trust a practitioner places. It’s all delivered by people, not by a logo or a website. Which means that internal brand activation is not an optional add-on to a healthcare rebrand. It is mission-critical.

Your staff need to understand your brand proposition, believe in it and know how to bring it to life in the work they do every day. This requires investment in brand launch strategy, in internal communications, in leadership engagement, and often in an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that connects the organisational brand to the experience of working there.

The organisations that consistently get the most out of a rebrand are those that treat the internal launch with the same seriousness as the external one. Because no matter how strong your new positioning, no matter how distinctive your visual identity, if your people don’t understand it or believe in it, the promise will ring hollow the moment a patient, client or practitioner actually engages with your organisation.

The new strategic framework should inspire your people and build deeper, more meaningful relationships with your clients. That only happens when the brand is lived from the inside out.

What a successful health rebrand requires

Drawing on our work across hospitals, health insurers, regulators, providers and education bodies, these are the factors we consistently see in healthcare rebrands that deliver real and lasting results:

Leadership commitment. A rebrand that has the genuine backing of the CEO and Board will always outperform one that is delegated entirely to marketing. This is a whole-of-organisation undertaking.

Deep audience insight. Whether through formal research or structured stakeholder consultation, a human-centred understanding of your audiences, their needs, perceptions, language and expectations, is the foundation of a compelling brand strategy.

Clear strategic intent. The rebrand should be anchored to a defined future direction. Where is the organisation headed? What needs to change, and why? What does success look like in three years?

A specialist partner. Healthcare rebranding requires both deep brand expertise and genuine sector understanding. The complexities of health, from regulatory constraints to clinical culture to the emotional weight of the sector, demand a partner who has navigated this territory before.

A commitment to activation. The work doesn’t end when the brand guidelines are signed off. The most important chapter is bringing the brand to life, internally and externally, in a way that builds belief and momentum.

Truly Deeply has led healthcare and medical rebrands for some of Australia’s most recognised organisations. From Ahpra, Anmac and Healthscope to Baptcare, GMHBA and the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre, we bring rigour, creativity and hard-won experience to every engagement in the sector.

If your brand is no longer doing justice to your organisation’s ambition, or you’re facing the kind of strategic inflection point that demands a rethink, we’d love to chat.

Ready to explore a rebrand?

We’d be happy to work through your challenges, identify your opportunities, and recommend the best path forward for your brand.

Get in touch with Truly Deeply

Michael Hughes

Michael is Managing Partner and Strategy Director at Truly Deeply. His deep expertise is building stakeholder alignment, unlocking insights, and defining the strategic power of your brand to create a differentiated, compelling, and authentic brand proposition that will engage all your audiences and drive your business growth. Michael has extensive experience working with leading Australian and International organisations across just about every sector.

When the Anmac appointed Truly Deeply, the brief was unambiguous: don’t simply refresh; be bold, brave, and ambitious.

Truly Deeply’s stakeholder and market research confirmed the existing brand felt dated, and there was a clear mandate from the Board, leadership and stakeholders to pause, reflect, and reset.

Anmac CEO Camilla Rowland says the rebrand marks a clear step forward for Anmac.

“It presents a more proactive and contemporary expression of who we are and aligns strongly with the direction set out in our new Strategic Plan. Early feedback has been very positive, particularly in how clearly it articulates our role in supporting and providing leadership for a safe, capable health workforce and strengthening public trust.”

Working closely with the Board, senior leadership and stakeholders, Truly Deeply aligned the new brand with Anmac’s evolving strategy. The result is a holistic brand framework that brings clarity and direction to internal and external audiences alike. The new brand promise is compelling and distinctive within the health sector, proudly proclaiming Anmac is ‘for a safe, capable nursing and midwifery workforce’.

The personality builds on Anmac’s reputation as principled and respected, while introducing more human, bold and progressive traits. Even the name evolved, with Anmac becoming the primary way of referencing the brand. It is also now written as a word rather than in all caps, which mirrors how most stakeholders refer to the organisation. A small change with a big impact on both warmth and approachability.

“Truly Deeply were highly collaborative and insight driven. The team demonstrated a strong ability to listen, challenge constructively, and translate complex inputs into a clear and compelling strategic direction”, added Rowland.

The new identity centres on an ‘A’ that stands for Australia, Assessment, Accreditation and Anmac. It also carries the weight of Alpha, the top grade. Its crossbar is formed by a rising tick: a symbol of improvement, achievement, and entry into the profession. The custom wordmark is bold and contemporary, with softened terminals that hold warmth without sacrificing authority.

The palette reinterprets the traditional colours of nursing and midwifery through the lens of the sky at dawn and dusk: navy for trust, purple for symbolism, magenta for passion and creativity. A white sphere, representing the rising sun, completes the system, framing imagery that honours the community’s deep regard for nurses and midwives.

Brand video

Services As part of the rebrand process, Truly Deeply provided Anmac with a brand & market review, stakeholder research, brand strategy, brand identity design, video production, collateral design, guidelines and cultural tools.

About Anmac Anmac is dedicated to building a safe and capable nursing and midwifery workforce through quality education and assessment. Anmac sets the standards for the professions, accredits education programs, and assesses healthcare practitioners trained overseas.

The Public Transport Ombudsman (PTO) appointed Truly Deeply to refine its brand and articulate clearly what it does, why it exists and the benefits it delivers for the Victorian community.

Truly Deeply’s stakeholder and market research confirmed strong trust in the PTO’s independence and service quality, but also revealed low brand awareness, an outdated visual identity and confusion about the organisation’s full role in the complaints system. The work also highlighted the need for more accessible, plain-language communication, particularly for people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities and people with disabilities.

Public Transport Ombudsman Ann Jorgensen says the new identity is a meaningful step forward for the organisation.

“We’re thrilled with our new brand identity and how it represents the three parties to our complaint processes – customer, member organisation, and the PTO. It’s the first substantial refresh of our brandmark since the Public Transport Ombudsman (PTO) was established in 2004 and is a key outcome of a recent review of the PTO’s public communications.”

Working closely with senior leadership and stakeholders, Truly Deeply developed a holistic brand strategy built around a clear organising idea: the brand essence ‘move forward fairly’, which captures why the PTO exists, what it stands for and the benefit it provides to the Victorian community. The strategy defined a renewed purpose, principles, values, core customer promise, messaging and personality, with tailored narratives for consumers, members, policymakers and other stakeholders to make the brand easier to understand and engage with.

The personality builds on the PTO’s reputation as independent and influential, while introducing more capable and approachable traits. The result is a clearer, more confident brand voice that uses plain language to reach all of the diverse audiences the PTO serves.

“The new brand has been instrumental in helping the PTO better communicate what we do, and the value we offer our community, industry and government stakeholders”, added Jorgensen.

The new identity centres on a dynamic trinity of arrows representing the three parties in any public transport complaint: the consumer, the operator and the PTO. Together, the arrows unite to form both a wheel, reinforcing the concept of forward motion, and a stylised ‘O’ for Ombudsman, the independent body that brings all parties together to resolve disputes efficiently and fairly while contributing to improved outcomes across the network.

A fresh palette of greens and blues, accented by warm highlights, offers a respectful nod to the past while establishing a more contemporary, approachable and assured feel. The visual system is clean, modern and directional, with the arrow motif creating a distinctive framing device that highlights movement, connection and clarity. Paired with a strong yet approachable font and bold yet personable tone, the identity reflects the PTO’s personality as independent, influential, capable and approachable, positioning the organisation as both a trusted authority and a constructive partner in shaping a better transport experience for all Victorians.

Services As part of the rebrand process, Truly Deeply provided the PTO with a brand and market review, stakeholder research, brand strategy and brand identity design.

About the PTO The Public Transport Ombudsman provides fair and efficient dispute resolution and improves public transport for the Victorian community.

Melbourne’s iconic Steer Dining Room now has a brand new look and positioning thanks to brand agency Truly Deeply.

Through in-depth market review and audience profiling, Truly Deeply honed the brand to resonate with Connoisseurs, Celebrators, Professionals, and Status Seekers.

The new brand proposition takes ownership of Steer’s recognised status as Melbourne’s temple of Wagyu excellence, supported by evocative storytelling.

“Seamlessly blending urban refinement with culinary innovation, Steer is a sanctuary for steak connoisseurs and lovers of modern luxury alike… guided by precision, provenance, and profound culinary reverence.”​​

The new identity—rooted in ritual and reverence—features a distinctive Wagyu bull’s head brandmark, its horns forming a luminous halo and a dish, reinforcing the restaurant’s mastery and almost spiritual devotion to Wagyu. From the refined monogram on the iconic ‘S’ through to custom iconography and layered visual language, every detail radiates sophistication and intention.​​

Supporting this is a bespoke Steer lexicon that reframes restaurant rituals: the menu is now ‘Regale’, the drinks ‘Imbibe’, and the bill, aptly, ‘Reckoning’. This vocabulary immerses guests in an experience as evocative and memorable as Steer’s cuisine.​

General Manager Harold Faizal captures the impact:

“Working with Truly Deeply was a turning point. Michael and Derek made the process seamless, insightful, and even joyful. Their professionalism, attention to detail, and genuine curiosity helped uncover not just what we do, but who we are.

Those brand sessions — defining our philosophy, clarifying our purpose, and reconnecting with what truly drives us — were transformative. In an industry where every day feels different, finding that clarity felt nothing short of cathartic.”​

Truly Deeply’s role included a market and brand review, detailed audience profiling, the articulation of a differentiated brand proposition, and the creation of a strategic brand platform. The new brand has been carefully crafted for tailored storytelling whilst also ensuring consistency across all communications touchpoints.​​

Beyond strategy, Truly Deeply delivered a comprehensive design system: brand identity, custom icons, visual language, collateral, and a lexicon, collectively shaping each stage of the guest experience.​​

A Melbourne icon, Steer Dining Room has consistently ranked among the world’s top steak destinations. As the restaurant evolved from a steak bar and grill into a refined showcase for Australian and Japanese Wagyu, its brand identity struggled to reflect newfound sophistication and exclusivity. With world-class produce, meticulous preparation, and a storyteller’s approach to presentation, every aspect of Steer’s experience demanded a brand identity with the same depth, elegance, and cult-like passion for Wagyu.​

See the full case study here.

Father’s Day has long been one of retail’s seasonal bright spots, but this year’s research from the Australian Retailers Association (ARA) in collaboration with Roy Morgan tells a more nuanced story: fewer Australians are shopping for Dad, but those who do are spending significantly more.

With 4.7 million shoppers expected to spend a combined $720 million, gift-buying is down from 2024 by about $100 million. Yet, the average outlay per gift-buyer has jumped 44% to $145, signalling a clear “quality over quantity” trend.

For brand owners and managers, this shift holds powerful insights about where consumer sentiment is heading as cost-of-living pressures reshape shopping behaviour.

Key Takeaways for Brands and Retailers

1. Premiumisation is the winning story
Even as overall participation drops, those who can spend are choosing to make it count. With one in four shoppers planning to spend over $200, Father’s Day purchasing is shifting towards higher-value, premium products and meaningful experiences.
For brands, that means this isn’t the year to race to the bottom with discounts—it’s about framing your product as the special, lasting, or indulgent choice.

2. Experiences are competing with products
Gifting isn’t just about what’s in the box. A growing number of Australians are celebrating by sharing a meal—28% say they’ll mark the day at home or at a café/restaurant. Dining, outings, and experiences represent not just competition for traditional gifts, but also partnership opportunities for brands looking to extend their footprint into lifestyle and hospitality.

3. Generational differences matter
ARA notes that older Australians are more willing to keep spending, while younger consumers are pulling back—likely due to mortgage stress and tighter budgets. For marketers, this demographic split highlights the need for differentiated messaging:

• Younger audiences → value-driven bundles, flexible payment options, or smaller but meaningful gestures.
• Older demographics → clear positioning around quality, family celebration, and elevated gifting.

4. Expansion beyond traditional “Dad”
Around 1.9 million Aussies are shopping for someone other than their father—partners, step-dads, grandfathers, or father-figures. Brands that speak inclusively to these relationships can expand their relevance and tap into overlooked segments of the market.

5. Brand storytelling is more important than ever
With fewer but higher-value purchases being made, consumers are investing in gifts that feel justified, personal and memorable. Brands that tell meaningful stories—whether tied to craftsmanship, family connection, or self-care—will be better positioned to resonate during today’s more scrutinised spending decisions.

Opportunities for Brand Owners and Managers

• Position for indulgence: Whether it’s premium spirits, tech accessories, or tailored menswear, brands should highlight indulgence, quality and longevity.
• Tighten your targeting: Speak differently to younger, budget-conscious audiences versus older buyers with more disposable spending power.
• Leverage omnichannel experiences: Link gift cards or products with memorable experiences (e.g. dinner vouchers, grooming packages, bundled offers).
• Encourage early purchase: With budgets under pressure, helping consumers spread out spending via pre-sales or payment plans lowers the purchase barrier.
• Celebrate inclusivity: Broaden Father’s Day campaigns to include all kinds of father-figures—it’s not just “Dad” anymore.

Final Thought

As Chris Rodwell, CEO of the ARA, explains, “Families who can are choosing quality over quantity this year when it comes to celebrating Dad.” For brand leaders, that message is a call to rethink Father’s Day not just as a sales spike—but as an opportunity to deepen emotional connections, elevate gifting experiences, and ensure your brand sits at the heart of those high-value purchases.

Read more about the research here.