The Blanchard® Rebrand

The Heart of Human Achievement™

For nearly half a century, The Ken Blanchard Company has been synonymous with leadership excellence. However, the company faced a significant challenge: emerging from the shadow of its founder and demonstrating its relevance in today's dynamic business landscape.

To revitalize the brand and establish a strong brand identity for Blanchard as an industry leader, we initiated a comprehensive rebranding effort. Through close collaboration with an external agency, we developed a brand identity that honors the company's rich history while projecting a modern, forward-thinking image.

Our efforts focused on creating a cohesive brand ecosystem that highlights the organization's collective strengths. The result is a brand that reflects Blanchard's expertise in emotional intelligence and strategic leadership, positioning the company as an indispensable partner in developing high-performing teams. This transformation empowers Blanchard to engage a broader audience, attract top talent, and drive sustainable growth.

Blanchard Style Guides

Branding guide with colors, icons, typography, patterns, and layouts.

Color Palette: The specific colors that make up the Blanchard experience

Blanchard’s color palette reflects their heritage while balancing depth with inspiration, essential components of strong brand identity. The primary colors include green, symbolizing growth, and navy, representing experience and exploration, which align with our commitment to leadership excellence. We enhance this refined palette with touches of orange and yellow to ignite moments of inspiration and innovation, showcasing our emotional intelligence and making our color scheme as dynamic as our brand.

Icons express larger concepts, simply and intuitively

We used icons throughout the collateral to convey larger messages in a single graphic, reinforcing our brand identity. To maintain consistency across our assets and support our focus on emotional intelligence and leadership excellence, we created a library of icons for Blanchard.

People at the Heart

Inspired Leaders

Blanchard is a human-centered business, emphasizing brand identity while maintaining a people-centric approach to photography.

The primary imagery features focused, candid shots of leaders showcasing moments of joy, looking outward toward what’s ahead. These photos invite our audiences to see themselves in our visuals—leaders inspired by others, fostering leadership excellence through shared experiences.

Curious Learners

This set of supporting photographs highlights the learning experience at Blanchard, underscoring the importance of emotional intelligence. The images depict leaders actively listening, engaging with the content, and participating in meaningful interactions. As our products and offerings are available both in person and online, we illustrate the audience learning across a range of environments and channels.

Confident Communicators

We believe that communication is a fundamental skill essential for leaders to master in order to effectively manage and inspire great teams. This second set of supporting photography reflects that belief. In these images, leaders are engaged in conversations, making eye contact with those they’re speaking to one-on-one or while presenting, showcasing their commitment to leadership excellence.

The visual representation of our messaging, curated with people in mind.

For our Blanchard brand identity, we selected two sans-serif fonts for design materials: Barlow and Noto Sans. Barlow is utilized for display-type treatments, projecting boldness and confidence that resonate with our leadership excellence. Meanwhile, Noto Sans is a reliable typeface, crafted for legibility and ease of use, supporting our commitment to emotional intelligence in communication. Both fonts are Google Fonts, ensuring they are easily downloadable and usable worldwide for translations.

The shapes that build on each other to help tell our story

The graphics feature a dynamic system of shapes designed to complement and enhance one another, reinforcing our brand identity! The communication bubble shape beautifully connects our visual and verbal elements, including the logo. Sharp lines and angles convey structure and organization, while softer curves embody connection and community, essential aspects of emotional intelligence. This thoughtful mix of shapes, both angular and rounded, powerfully reinforces our mission at The Heart of Human Achievement™ and exemplifies leadership excellence. The shapes can be creatively combined to form vibrant patterns, adapt to showcase images, or expand to deliver engaging copy. Let's explore the endless possibilities together!

A brands visual representation

A dialogue between the “b” and “d” that bookend a name.

The Blanchard® wordmark serves as the primary graphic representation of the brand identity. It reflects the principles of human communication and emotional intelligence in leadership excellence, expressing a grounded, timeless evolution of the Blanchard identity. The logo clearly communicates the brand’s key attributes, legacy, and market position. It appears modern and approachable without seeming overly technical or too youthful. In most applications, the wordmark functions as the core logo and is typically presented in green or blue.

The compact version of the primary logo that works in small contexts.

The Blanchard "b" is a key element of our brand identity. It effectively conveys the essence of our full wordmark in compact spaces. At the heart of leadership excellence are communication and human connection, which this symbol represents. By interlocking the Blanchard B with a communication bubble, we celebrate our commitment to emotional intelligence in leadership. This symbol will be featured prominently as the image on our social channels and as the favicon on web browsers.