Monarch Water

Monarch Water, part of the Culligan group, is a leading provider of innovative and high-quality water solutions.

Creative Company was approached to create an aspirational brand image for the company to help it maximise opportunities in its current space.

Monarch Water’s existing brand collateral felt tired, generic, and no longer representative of the customer it wanted to appeal to. The new brand needed to feel progressive and dynamic and, most of all, stand out in the crowded water treatment marketplace.

The challenge was to create inspiring, market-leading collateral for Monarch’s water treatment technology. From the onset, we planned to avoid the obvious lifestyle cliches of images with soapy bubbles and soft towels.

The new identity pares back the old wave style ‘M’ icon, creating a streamlined and simplified brand mark that can either stand alone or be complemented by a bold, uppercase, san serif typeface. The forward-angled ‘slash’ of the heritage brand becomes a contemporary, standalone ‘positivity’ graphic and is used to highlight and support key content.

The new base colour palette of black, mid-greys and white with a vibrant mid-blue set the tone for the business of the business. At the same time, sky blue, flamingo red, forest green and canary yellow supports different sectors and activities, from domestic to foodservice and sustainability to the updated ‘Ultimate Installer’s Club’. Each palette helps set Monarch apart and position them perfectly for their future development.

Low-key photography in unusual angles of applications and products reflects the new brand positioning, with black vignettes adding to the premium feel.

A comprehensive multi-sector website, organised by product and application, features the whole product range. Tailored technology includes a water hardness checker by postcode technology that provides live results. There’s the capability to find your perfect softener using conditional technology and a map-based UK-wide stockists search tool with travel directions to help users complete the ‘check—find—fulfil’ circle. The site also features four sector-specific media centres and an ‘Ultimate Installer’s Club’ – a unique membership area offering; rewards, incentives and a knowledge hub.

A suite of high-production quality printed Domestic and Foodservice product catalogues with QR technology to link users to the website.

An updated universal product labelling solution not only adapts the core brand identity but introduces an ‘at a glance’ colour-coded lozenge system to help identify the product’s primary and secondary uses and its positioning in the range as a sustainable product, i.e. based on the running order and size of the lozenge graphics. The colour coding is proving to be very useful for all stakeholders, from installers to clients and warehouse operatives.

A creative suite of multi-purpose videos, including a Midi softener product promotional video, a benefits of soft water video and a softener installer video.

Creative Company’s new brand identity for Monarch Water takes it from a generic-looking water softener brand to a premium offer which is perfectly placed to appeal to its domestic and foodservice end users and installers while standing out in the crowded water treatment marketplace.