How do you build a brand that’s designed to outgrow itself? (A Deloitte Case Study)

Deloitte EMO's Dandelion

Some organizations measure success by how much they grow. Deloitte's Emerging Market Opportunities group measured success by how many successful businesses eventually left.

Their mandate was to identify promising ventures, nurture them, and help them become independent organizations. That created an unusual branding challenge for us. We were designing one for a launchpad.

Discover

Forget the sketches. Ditch the mood boards. Break out the questions first.

Before any creative work began, I facilitated a Brand Alignment Workshop with EMO’s leadership team to understand how they described the organization, where priorities differed, and what success actually looked like.

The conversations quickly revealed something interesting. Everyone agreed on what EMO did. Fewer people agreed on what it fundamentally was.

That distinction mattered. A clear identity couldn’t emerge until leadership shared the same definition of the brand itself.

Align

Once the strategic direction became clear, the creative work became surprisingly straightforward.

One idea kept resurfacing throughout the workshop: EMO wasn’t meant to hold onto new ventures forever. Its role was to create the conditions for growth, then let those businesses thrive independently.

That led to the central metaphor: a dandelion.

But not really the dandelion itself, more its behaviour.

The flower creates dozens of independent seeds, each capable of taking root somewhere new while remaining connected to a common origin.

It perfectly reflected the organization’s mission: creating opportunities that extend far beyond the parent brand.

The identity system grew naturally from that idea, giving EMO a visual language that felt purposeful instead of decorative.

Activate

With the strategy established, the identity expanded into a complete brand system. Every element, from typography and colour to publications, presentations, and digital communications, reinforced the same idea of growth, movement, and opportunity.

Because the strategy had already aligned leadership, design decisions became faster and more objective. Were weren't forcing creative to define meaning, just to express it.

The Outcome

The finished identity gave Emerging Market Opportunities a clear position within Deloitte while providing enough flexibility to support future ventures as the organization evolved. More importantly, it gave leadership a shared language for discussing the brand internally.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the logo wasn’t the solution here. They needed alignment. The identity simply made that alignment visible.

What this project reinforced

People often assume effective branding is the product of great design. But in my experience, it's more like great design is the product of clarity, and effective branding requires clarity. When leadership agrees on what a brand stands for, creative work stops feeling subjective. Ideas become easier to evaluate. Decisions happen faster. And the identity feels inevitable rather than arbitrary.

That’s why I start every engagement with questions instead of concepts.

Better brands really do begin with better questions.

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  EMO Group Brand Guidelines

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  EMO Group Brand Guidelines

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  EMO Group Brand Guidelines

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  EMO Group Brand Guidelines