As residents of the beautiful Baltic smart city of Tallinn in Estonia, we’re utterly enamoured with living in such an advanced location, almost everything is digitised and accessible from your phone or laptop!

But what does the smart cities market look like and how do you brand them?

A such a high percentage of communication in Estonia is digital and it’s only increasing. We already think of Tallinn as a smart city due to its advanced tech start-up scene and high rate of digitisation, however the global rate of smart cities is also increasing.

Firstly, when trying to brand for a nebulous and broad marketplace, we had to decide on a set of parameters to classify what a smart city is and how companies orientate themselves to the market. It’s a tricky thing as they’re not a well-defined sector – and comprise of many different facets that, when considered on their own, have a unique identity already.

Using the parameters, we could assess which of the six pillars most of our clients fit into and start our research from there. It’s a slow process as many companies don’t overtly say they’re orientated to smart cities; however, it can be deduced from their branding that they do.

With this in mind, we decided on the logomark needed a high level of nebulousness to translate to the global marketplace yet strike a modern balance to land with the client’s customers and peer organisations also. We had to semiotic signs from many different codes to say this is where they work together, without being too literal (as is the case when branding science, tech, health and defence clients in the past).

An exciting challenge and most definitely the shape of things to come.

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