Transform Magazine
Overview
Transform Magazine is a global magazine for brand strategy, brand design and rebranding, published in London by Cravenhill Publishing. Launched as a magazine in 2014, it is a quarterly print title supported by a continuously updated website, and it celebrates what its publisher calls the transformative power of brand strategy and design. It is aimed at brand design and strategy agencies and at in-house brand, marketing and communications professionals, the people responsible for creating, evolving and governing the identities of companies, products, institutions and places.
Transform describes itself as the only global magazine dedicated to rebranding and brand development, focusing on corporate and brand communications. It is the sister magazine of Communicate, Cravenhill's title for corporate communications and stakeholder relations, and it grew directly out of the Transform Awards, the programme Cravenhill established in 2009 to celebrate rebranding, repositioning and brand transformation.
Origins in the Transform Awards
The story of Transform begins in 2009, when Cravenhill Publishing launched the inaugural Transform Awards in London. The awards were created to recognise best practice in corporate, product and place brand development, with categories focusing on strategy, execution, content and evaluation across the whole brand development process. At a time when rebranding work was often judged only on its visual result, the awards insisted that strategy, implementation and stakeholder engagement mattered equally.
The awards programme expanded internationally, and in 2014 Cravenhill launched Transform Magazine to coincide with that global expansion. The magazine gave the awards a year-round editorial voice and gave the branding community a publication in which award-winning work could be examined in depth. In its launch year the magazine was shortlisted at the PPA Independent Publisher Awards 2014 in both the Best Launch or Relaunch category and the Front Cover of the Year category, early industry recognition for the new title.
Publisher Cravenhill Publishing
Transform is published by Cravenhill Publishing, an independent publishing and events company based in London and founded by Andrew Thomas. Cravenhill's business is focused on corporate and brand communications: it publishes Communicate Magazine alongside Transform, and organises conferences and a portfolio of awards programmes in the fields in which it operates. The publisher describes its awards as industry-leading programmes that benchmark and reward best practice.
As an independent specialist publisher, Cravenhill built Transform as a combined media and events brand. The magazine, the website and the international awards ceremonies support one another: the awards supply case studies and contacts, the magazine supplies analysis and profile, and both serve the same concentrated professional audience of agencies and brand owners.
Editorial Focus
Transform's editorial content covers brand strategy and design in their full breadth. Features examine visual identity, brand architecture, naming, copy style and tone of voice, brand evolution, implementation and internal communication of a rebrand, and the management of reputation through brand. Case studies of rebrands, from transport operators and broadcasters to universities, charities and law firms, are examined for both their creative work and their strategic reasoning.
The magazine also addresses the business of branding: the agency sector, client relationships, research and evaluation, and the changing technology of brand management, including digital properties and social media. Its audience of agency specialists and in-house brand managers reads it for informed accounts of work elsewhere in the world against which their own projects can be compared.
The Transform Awards Worldwide
The Transform Awards are celebrated in multiple regions of the world, with programmes historically held in cities including London, Dubai, New York, Shanghai, Stockholm and Sydney, covering Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, North America, Asia, the Nordics and Australia and New Zealand. Each programme benchmarks entries against their peers and rewards excellence across the brand development process, with categories grouped under content, process, strategy, type of rebrand and sector or region.
Among the most coveted honours are Best Overall Visual Identity and the Grand Prix for excellence in rebranding and brand transformation. At the 2014 European awards, for example, Eurostar won Best Overall Visual Identity for a transformation from a functional brand into one intended to inspire adventure, while ITV's large-scale cross-channel rebrand won the Grand Prix alongside several other trophies and was described by a judge as textbook reading on how to rebrand. Award winners receive the programme's distinctive butterfly trophies, and the results are reported in detail by the magazine.
Further Awards and Community Programmes
Alongside the main Transform Awards, Cravenhill has developed related programmes under the Transform banner. The Transform Young Contenders awards celebrate the next generation of strategic and creative brand talent shaping the future of the industry, while other Cravenhill programmes, including the Corporate & Financial Awards and the Digital Impact Awards run by the wider publishing team, serve adjacent parts of the communications community.
Conferences and events complete the community offer, bringing together judges, winners, agencies and clients. For a professional field that often works project by project and in confidence, such gatherings and published awards results create a shared public record of achievement and standards.
Readership and Audience
Transform is targeted at brand design and strategy agencies and at in-house brand and marketing professionals. Its readership therefore spans the creative directors, strategists and consultants who produce brand work and the corporate affairs, marketing and design managers who commission and govern it. Because the awards are international, the magazine's community extends well beyond its London base, following the geography of its ceremonies in Europe, the Middle East, North America, Asia and Australasia.
The magazine's print frequency has been described by its publisher as quarterly, although some reference listings describe it as monthly, reflecting the combination of quarterly print issues with continuous online publishing. Editor listings have named Jack Cousins as editor of the title.
Digital Presence
The magazine's website at transformmagazine.net publishes brand news, features, case studies and awards information continuously, including entry details, judging processes, fees and shortlists for each regional awards programme. It serves as the administrative home of the Transform Awards as well as the magazine's digital edition, carrying author pages, news stories and reports of ceremonies from each region.
Digital and social channels report awards nights and winning work to a global professional audience, and the publisher's descriptions of the title in its current form emphasise this combination: a quarterly print title that celebrates brand transformation, supported by a website, conferences and awards programmes around the world.
Coverage of Landmark Rebrands
Through its awards and features, Transform has documented many of the most-discussed rebrands of the past decade and a half. The rebrands of broadcasters, railway operators, universities, cultural institutions, financial and professional services firms and public sector bodies have been assessed in its pages against criteria that balance creativity with strategy and delivery. Winning entries, from Eurostar and ITV in 2014 to more recent winners in sectors such as sport, property and education, form a continuing case library for practitioners.
That record has educational value within the industry. Students of design and brand management, and clients preparing their own brand programmes, can trace through Transform how expectations of a rebrand have changed: from a new logo and visual identity towards evidenced strategy, employee engagement, digital expression and measured reputational effect.
Place in Design and Communications Media
Design magazines traditionally cover branding as one part of graphic design, while marketing magazines approach it from advertising and consumer insight. Transform occupies the space between and beyond those positions, treating brand as a corporate asset managed at board level and expressed through design, language, behaviour and digital experience. Its foundation first as awards in 2009 and then as a magazine in 2014 reflected the maturation of branding into a distinct professional discipline with its own standards and community.
Partnerships have extended that position internationally, including a partnership between Cravenhill Publishing, the Transform Awards Asia and the Vietnam Design Association intended to honour effective brand development and help local design industries connect globally.
Significance
Transform Magazine is significant as the global magazine of record for rebranding and brand development. Created by London's Cravenhill Publishing out of the Transform Awards launched in 2009, and published as a magazine since 2014, it has given the branding profession a dedicated publication and an international awards structure against which work can be benchmarked.
Its influence rests on that combination of journalism and judgement: the magazine reports and analyses brand work, while the awards define and reward excellence in it. For agencies and brand owners alike, Transform provides both a mirror for the industry and one of its principal stages.
