When fourteen branches each design their own signage, you do not have a brand. You have fourteen brands that happen to share a bank account.
The Challenge
Meridian grew by acquisition. Each acquired company kept its own logo, its own truck livery and, in four cases, its own name on the invoice. Customers who used two branches often did not realise they were dealing with the same group — which meant the group was paying to acquire customers it already had.
Internally the cost was quieter but real. Every branch commissioned its own print work, so the group was buying the same brochure fourteen times at fourteen small-run prices.
Strategy before aesthetics
We did not open a design tool for the first three weeks. Instead we interviewed nineteen people: branch managers, dispatchers, two long-standing customers and, importantly, three customers who had left.
One sentence from a dispatcher in Tangier ended up shaping the whole identity: "We are not the fastest. We are the one that tells you the truth about when it will arrive." Reliability, not speed, became the positioning — and that decision is why the identity looks calm rather than kinetic.
What We Did
A single wordmark with a modular container system: the mark stays constant, the container adapts to trucks, uniforms, documents and screens. Branches keep a local descriptor in a fixed position rather than a separate logo.
We built a typographic system around one family with clear multilingual coverage — Latin and Arabic — because half of their operational documents are bilingual and the previous setup used two unrelated typefaces that never sat comfortably together.
The rollout kit mattered as much as the design. Every branch received print-ready templates, a livery specification with measurements, and a two-page decision sheet for the questions that always come up at 4 pm on a Friday.
The rollout
- Phase 1 — digital and documents, effective immediately at no material cost.
- Phase 2 — signage and uniforms, scheduled against each branch's existing replacement cycle.
- Phase 3 — vehicle livery, applied at routine servicing over fourteen months.
Sequencing by replacement cycle rather than by calendar removed almost all of the rebrand budget. Nothing serviceable was thrown away.
The Outcome
Unaided brand recall in their two core markets tripled over twelve months, measured against a baseline we captured before any work began. Print production cost fell 52% once all fourteen branches ordered from one library at group volume.
The quieter result: three of the four branches that had kept their acquired names asked to move to the group name within the first year. Nobody instructed them to.
We expected a logo. What we got was a reason for fourteen offices to finally agree on something.
Karim Belhaj — Group Marketing Director, Meridian Freight
What we would do differently
We should have brought the two most sceptical branch managers into the strategy interviews as participants, not as an audience for the result. They came round eventually, but three months later than necessary.
Thinking about a rebrand?
— the first call is free and we will tell you honestly whether you need one.
