Repositioned · Property data
Cotality
A brand rollout and an office move, run as one story rather than two announcements.
Change communications · Internal brand rollout · Creative system
The engagement
The situation
Cotality is a property data business operating across Australia and New Zealand. Two things were landing at once: the Sydney team was moving onto a single floor, and a refreshed brand was rolling out across offices in both countries with Sydney as the flagship moment.
That coincidence is rarer than it sounds. Physical space, visual identity and employee experience almost never change in the same quarter, and when they do, they either reinforce each other or they compete.
The problem
An office move is usually handled as logistics: dates, floor plans, a FAQ. But the change is practical and emotional at the same time. People are attached to their workspaces and their routines, and a move delivered as a series of announcements leaves gaps that people fill with their own assumptions.
The brand rollout carried the harder version of the same risk. A refreshed identity that arrives as new templates is a cosmetic event. A refreshed identity that arrives as a reason is something staff can actually repeat, and staff repeat it long before any market hears it.
The decision
Treat the two changes as one story. The move and the brand were not competing announcements; the move was the first physical proof that the new brand meant something.
Shape it as a deliberate journey rather than a sequence of notices, so people arrived at moving day already knowing why it was happening and what it was for.
The work
A one-week discovery to align scope and success measures with the core project team, and a review of the existing research, comms and collateral.
A change and engagement plan with a sequenced communications schedule across audiences, including what happens after the move rather than only up to it.
The creative platform, Lifting Up Together, built from the brand value of lifting people up and from the literal move up a floor. The visual system rendered the team as arrows lifting together, so the idea worked as a message and as a picture.
A full digital asset suite: email banners across four treatments, Teams backgrounds, posters, intranet banners and digital screen content.
A leader toolkit, so managers could hold quality conversations with their own teams rather than forwarding an email.
The result
One creative platform carried both the move and the brand rollout, in the offices and in the inbox.
Leaders were equipped to answer the questions people actually ask, including the ones they ask each other.
The refreshed brand reached staff as an idea they could repeat, rather than as a new set of templates.
A brand lands with your own people before it ever lands with a market, and the moments when something physical changes are the ones staff read hardest. Most organisations spend that moment on logistics. It is the cheapest brand-building opportunity a business ever gets.
Your version of this starts with a diagnosis.
Fixed scope, and a named diagnosis inside two weeks.