Rebranding ClearCourse: why our new brand identity is crucial for our future

As a brand, ClearCourse has had a visual identity since we were founded in 2018. We had a logo, we had a tone of voice. We had a website, and we had a ‘look’. And it all worked. 

However, four years is a long time, and as we race towards 2023, the ClearCourse business is very different to the ClearCourse of 2018. 

When we launched the business, we had a team of four in a small shared office in London. 

The name ClearCourse came about after much deliberation, collaboration and guidance from Aquiline, our investment partners. 

We created a simple logo – one that had meaning and depth – put the sign above the door (so to speak) and we were off, quickly realising our initial business goal: to buy our first business.

Fast forward to 2022 and that one business has become more than 30. 

We are planning on entering 2023 at a run rate of £100m with over £1Bn of payments flow, which is quite some distance from our standing start in 2018. 

And we believed we needed a new look for the business. 

After all, ClearCourse has grown up. 

It’s matured from a four-person, shared office start-up to a national company with 11 offices across the UK. 

Those office locations enable us to tap into the best talent across the country and, in some cases, beyond. 

Today our sites are bursting with the enthusiasm and expertise of more than 800 ClearCoursers working on more than 30 brands, serving more than 20,000 customers across the UK and Ireland – and in some cases, further afield. 

Our people and our brand are guided by our FAIR™ Values, which keep us all on the right course, day in, day out. 

Our new branding needed to embody all of that, while being underpinned by the ethos of what is essentially ClearCourse 2.0.

Creating a future-proof brand

The rebrand of 2022 has seen a lot of workshop hours, expertise, thought, debate and discussion. 

Culture and inclusion hugely influenced our decision to rebrand, too. 

As we acquire new businesses, they bring with them their people, technology, customers and culture – and we felt it was important that our brand and our purpose was easy to understand and identify with.

We wanted to get the look and feel right, of course, but much more importantly we wanted to uncover, identify and create the values, mission and vision that would underpin what we wanted the ‘new’ ClearCourse to be. 

A brand that would help us grow. A brand that would attract new customers, new software. 

A brand that would be an employer of choice, and that people would aspire to work for. 

A brand that could evolve with us as we grow - one that would future-proof the organisation for the next stage of our journey. 

Our ‘Just Do It’

Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ tagline is the branding gold standard, and it’s one every business wants to emulate. 

Our ‘Just Do it’?  Working better together. 

The words themselves aren’t revolutionary, but the meaning we believe – for ClearCourse, our brands, customers and people – can be. 

Those three words perfectly capture all that we do and how we do it. The concept being that by engaging, joining, commissioning, contracting and appointing ClearCourse, the outcome is better.

However, this is far more than a nice, pithy brand statement that has little to back it up. The impact of ‘working better together’ is widely evident throughout ClearCourse on a daily basis. 

• When a new business joins ClearCourse they can work better as they’re able to leverage support, expertise, investment or networks that might otherwise be unattainable. 

• Their people become part of a larger organisation, a wider community and with greater opportunity for career progression and development. 

• The customers of the acquired business might see enhancement in their solution or software as we integrate other products and our ClearAccept payment platform into their software. 

• The end-customer and consumers of our customers will benefit from software that does more, more smoothly and payments that offer greater flexibility and seamlessness.

• As our business grows, so does our responsibility to each other, to the community and society as a whole. Together we can create a greater impact on issues such as diversity, inclusion and sustainability. 

Increasingly, it is the corporate world that shoulders the responsibility of making the right choices and implementing policy and practice that benefits society as a whole. 

At ClearCourse, we enjoy and thrive on that responsibility and by working better together, we can achieve more, faster.

Getting the right look 

Our new brand identity is simple. 

It’s clean, unfussy and has been described as calming. 

We’re proud of how it looks and the messages that the brand conveys. 

We’ve applied our new look across our marketing channels and communication tools and, of course, this website.

Our original brand identity (shown above) incorporated a compass. The concept behind the ClearCourse brand was around navigation, clear pathways and the avoidance of pitfalls – hence our meeting rooms at HQ are named after three famous explorers, Bessie Coleman, Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. 

We were conscious of not wanting to lose the compass – its meaning still held true – but we were equally aware that we needed to modernise the mark and create a device that gave us broader scope through communications.

The new and modernised ClearCourse compass is made up of the ClearCourse Compass Point, which is pointing North East - the preferred direction for our regular business review charts and graphs. 

In addition, we retained the ClearCourse Plus Point from the previous branding – a symbol that represents growth and value creation. 

And ‘working better together’.

A brand family that new businesses can step into

Our new clear and simple brand identity for ClearCourse will also be reflected across the core brands that underpin a lot of what we do – ClearAccept, ClearConnect, ClearDebit – and we’ve also been able to create a brand family that some of our businesses can step into. 

Of course, some of our software businesses will retain their original branding, especially where they have a strong and recognisable brand in their given sector. 

Others, however, will adopt a more ‘ClearCourse’ look and feel. 

Regardless, one thing brings them all together: the notion of working better together.