Institute for Credentialing Excellence
The Institute for Credentialing Excellence has a broad member community focused on professional development for credentialing professionals and offers highly-regarded accreditation services. It engaged Mekanic to reduce brand confusion among its many sub-brands, products, and services, and refresh its visual identity, positioning, and messaging.
Process
I.C.E. brought a cross-functional core brand team to advise on their brand’s historical architecture, how past programs and sub-brands have been added over time, and help distill the brand down to two key functions: membership and accreditation. The NCCA accrediting body – a well-known sub-brand – needed to have a clearer tie to the parent brand and other accreditation sub-brands. The brand nomenclature and visual hierarchy needed a more cohesive and logical structure. The brand messaging needed to convey two distinct personalities: a welcoming and supportive member community, along with rigorous and well-regarded accreditation services. We started by visualizing the entire brand family as a cohesive system and then designed a visual identity and messages that could clearly articulate brand value and the many relationships among the sub-brands.
Execution
We re-designed the brand architecture to have two main sub-sections: membership and accreditation, both of which are functionally separate but deliver essential value to audiences. The brand mark was derived from the letters of the brand’s acronym and designed to resemble parts of a whole—just as membership and accreditation are separate aspects of a unified parent brand. Building on the design of the brand mark, a spectrum of greens and blues were applied across the sub-brand architecture, with green hues representing the membership brand and blue hues representing accreditation services. With a range of supporting color palettes and neutrals, I.C.E.’s many member education programs and accreditation services have unique identities while still having clear relationships to the parent brand.
