The second post in our Lighting the Lantern series focused on Stokefire’s development of our brand. Since there are two sides to every story, we invited the Stokefire team to share their experiences working with us. Our thanks to them for accepting the invitation.

A peek inside the branders’ heads:

John came to Stokefire with what we found to be a wonderfully compelling idea. Roughly paraphrasing, it was this: “What if you could look back through your career and select the very best people you’d ever worked with, and ask them to come with you and create a company that did truly brilliant work?” This seemed a wonderful idea to our team. Every organization of size seems to have at least a few people who are there because it’s convenient to have someone in that particular seat, not because the person is the right person to be there. In what is perhaps a first for our organization, we encouraged John to hold off on investing in the brand until he had a better sense of who was going to be on the team and what their desires were. In most cases a brand is more powerful when the decision-makers are limited in number. In this case the philosophy of the company was known but the personality wasn’t yet set. We wanted to ensure we developed a brand that embraced both.

We’re glad we waited. In our kick-off meeting we met with John, Virginia, and George – whom we talked with at length about strategy, tactics, and differentiation – all the while assessing the organizational personality. We were blown away by the force of the team’s conviction. Passion is often missing from technology brands – but not from this. We knew almost immediately that there was enough power here to drive a brand home if we could find the right message.

During the evening meeting, we found many differentiators and sparks for potential brand directions. John’s team seemed both excited and occasionally disappointed as we discussed various ideas and sometimes had to set them aside as it was determined that the messaging wasn’t quite right or wasn’t unique within the market. That was until Virginia made an off-hand comment in explaining why she felt effectiveness was truly a differentiator for the team. To paraphrase, she said that the people John brought in are the type of people who have the talent to solve what the client’s self-described problem is, but also to understand any deeper causes of the issue and remediate those as well. In laymen’s terms (for my benefit) it was described as “When a client says he wants us to stop that annoying alert from disturbing him, there’s a difference between disconnecting the speaker or hiding the alert and actually solving the problem that’s causing the alert in the first place.”

From that discussion came a little note on our white board that said “You have to see the real problem to solve the problem.” It was just one of about fifty different things noted that day, but it was a great one.

As we revisited the board in the days that followed that one little item kept coming back. I know I chanted “You have to see it to solve it” a few thousand times as we went through the creative process. Ideas were tossed around about light spectrums, light sources, brightness, visibility and invisibility as well as dozens of other directions off of different notes. But we kept coming back to the “See it. Solve it.” concept, which incidentally turned out to be the ready-made tagline for the brand.

The final stage of brand development involved turning words into images. We worked with dozens of designers to find the right way to convey Lantern Three. We screened hundreds of concepts from locals and artists around the globe, providing art direction and guidance to drive the best concepts forward. It took a model-maker from across the Atlantic to develop what you see today. He pulled the three circles of overlapping color together and thus created a hidden “3″ that is hinted on the reverse of the Lantern Three business card, and is likely to show up in animations down the road. The logo showed the three circles of light, and at the same moment hid the numeral within. It was a spectacular way of illustrating both the obvious three lantern metaphor and also a secondary emphasis on seeing what is truly there rather than just what was explained or expected to be there.

We’ve admired how John and his team have brought this brand identity into their hearts – actively promoting and defending it in the market and with our own organization. It is a truly wondrous (and even a bit terrifying) feeling to find ourselves challenged by the Lantern Three team to live up to the brand that we’ve created for them. For Lantern Three and Stokefire, this is a brand that truly matters, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

You can read more at Stokefire’s blog or follow them on Twitter.

This is the second in a multi-part Lighting the Lantern series about the origin of Lantern Three.

Having an idea is one thing, having the time to execute it another.

I made the jump from internal IT to independent consultant in November of 2007, but was also finishing school part time until August 2008. While I made notes and continued to refine the concept, my first tentative step forward was to contact Stokefire in October of 2008. Tate Linden and I played tag until February 2009, when we finally met in person. I sought Stokefire out simply to come up with a name, but what Tate suggested (and we ultimately did) was to develop our brand.

By then, I had developed the short-list of the best people I wanted to recruit. I expected to work with Stokefire on the brand development, and reach out to them when we had something tangible to show. Tate suggested the opposite, and I agreed that everyone deserved input into the creation of our organization (since I insisted this was a company about us as problem solvers, not me).

With the four of us on board from day one (and others willing to join “when the time was right”), the Stokefire team reduced a list of 100 potential names to 13, which we narrowed to three before landing on Lantern as the stem. Why did we choose Lantern Three? That’s a story to be told in-person.

The name turned out to be the easy part, as the Lantern Three brand began to take shape. Over the course of several months, we refined our mission, goals, and expectations. The Stokefire team stayed in near-constant contact with us until they were sure we were comfortable with our brand. In Stokefire’s guest post, they tell their side of our story.

With a name, logo, and brand strategy, it was time to shift Lantern Three from concept to execution. We’ll explore that in part three of our Lighting the Lantern series.