AquaLogic: a brand strategy and a live brand portal built to scale

AquaLogic already had an identity and a growing reputation, but nowhere to put either down. When we came in, the business had a logo, a colour palette and years of hard-won trust, but no documented brand strategy, no guidelines anyone could open and trust, and no answer for how a brand new parent company, Sustec Group, should relate to it. We built the strategy, then built something to hold it: a live brand portal that replaces the old habit of a guidelines PDF nobody opens twice.

The outcome

AquaLogic had grown fast. Turnover had nearly doubled in two years, the team had passed 250 people, and the business had built a genuinely differentiated position: working the full water journey, from network to customer to field, in a way few competitors could match. None of that showed up in how the brand was told or organised.

The story had not kept pace with the business. Two straplines were in circulation at once. Ask five people what AquaLogic did and you would get five different, equally true, incomplete answers. As one director put it, the business was operating in silence: strong in what it delivered, quiet about it. And whatever brand thinking existed lived in scattered decks and one designer's memory, not somewhere the whole team could reach.

Delivered:

A brand strategy covering positioning, purpose, vision, mission, values, tone of voice and a messaging framework, for both AquaLogic and Sustec Group

A verbal identity: the ‘Intelligent water conservation’ strapline, four message pillars, and a light endorsement model for how the two brands relate

The existing visual identity properly documented for the first time: logo usage and clearspace rules, exact colour values, and a defined type system

A live brand portal that holds all of it, and gives Sustec's future acquisitions a home to join

New copy for the AquaLogic website: homepage, about, services, case studies, careers, news, and shop and contact

An ongoing marketing strategy and social media execution: a quarterly rhythm with the board, and a live content calendar across LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram

The challenge

AquaLogic came to us with a brand that had never had one, in three senses.

No documented strategy. Water conservation, leak detection, network maintenance, smart metering and customer-side delivery are genuinely one integrated business, but nobody had ever written down how to explain that. Different teams described it differently, and two straplines were live in the market at the same time.

No answer for Sustec. The buyout created a new parent brand overnight, with no rules for how it should sit behind AquaLogic, or how visible it should be as the group plans further acquisitions.

No single source of truth. AquaLogic had a logo and a palette, but nothing written down about how to use either properly, and nowhere the wider team could go to check. A market that had got louder made this worse: competitors were smaller and less capable, but more visible.

Our approach

We ran a brand strategy workshop with the leadership team, including the two directors behind the buyout, to get the real story: the roots back to Flow Control in 1979, the AquaLogic launch in 2004, the framework wins once a non-compete cleared in 2014, and the growth that followed.

One positioning, told the same way everywhere. Aqualogic is an integrated water conservation and demand management business, helping water companies reduce waste, improve performance and strengthen resilience through connected network, customer and field-based delivery. Every page, deck and conversation now starts from that one sentence.

A strapline that replaced two. ‘Intelligent water conservation’ resolved the split and gave the business one consistent line to lead with.

A brand architecture with rules, not guesswork. Aqualogic leads in every client-facing conversation. Sustec sits behind it as a light endorsement, ‘Aqualogic, a Sustec company’, visible enough to build credibility for future acquisitions without competing with the operating brand people actually know.

We didn't touch the logo. Aqualogic's aqua cyan and ink mark already worked. What it lacked was a rulebook: clear space, minimum sizes, exact colour values in hex, RGB, CMYK and Pantone, and a typography system built on Manrope. We wrote all of it down, properly, for the first time.

New copy for the website AquaLogic's own developer is building: homepage, about, services, case studies, careers, news, and shop and contact, all written from the same positioning and messaging framework.

The brand portal

This is the part we're proudest of, and the part we now want to build for other clients.

Guidelines only work if people actually use them, and a guidelines PDF sitting in a shared drive rarely gets opened twice. Print a colour value wrong once and it stays wrong in every deck for the next two years. Ask five people for the current logo file and you get five different versions, half of them out of date. So instead of writing AquaLogic another static document, we built them a live brand portal: a site that holds the strategy, the messaging, the visual identity and the downloadable assets for both AquaLogic and Sustec in one place, kept current as the group grows.

What it actually solves:

Guidelines nobody reads. A page you can send someone that opens in a browser, not a sixty page PDF that sits in a shared drive

Assets going out of date. Colour values, logos and templates live in one place, updated once, correct everywhere

No group-wide standard. Sustec and Aqualogic sit on the same architecture, with Aqualogic leading and Sustec quietly behind it

No room to grow. As Sustec acquires further operating businesses, each one gets its own area without a rebuild

Finding the right file. A downloads library the team can pull logos and templates from directly, instead of emailing round the same tired zip file

It is built to scale, which is the point. Sustec is a buy-and-build group: as it acquires further operating businesses, each one gets its own area on the same architecture, without a rebuild. The portal was designed from day one to grow the way the group intends to grow.

Marketing and social

A brand strategy is only real once it is out in the world. We also run AquaLogic's ongoing marketing: a quarterly rhythm with the board, plan, publish, drive traffic back to the new site, then measure and refine using analytics and Planable data before the next quarter starts.

AquaLogic's LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram now run on a live content calendar we manage in Planable: proof-led posts on its integrated approach, technology and forty-plus years in the industry, recruitment content for open field roles, company news, and tie-ins with national campaigns.

It is the same discipline as the brand portal, applied to the feed. Nothing improvised, everything traceable back to the strategy.

What it does for AquaLogic

AquaLogic now has one story, told the same way by everyone who tells it, a place everyone actually goes to check it, and a live marketing rhythm putting it in front of clients and candidates every week. Sustec has the beginnings of a group architecture built to support acquisitions rather than get in the way of them. And instead of a guidelines document that goes out of date the moment it is printed, the team has a brand portal that grows with the business.