We all celebrate perfection and are reluctant to accept criticism. That’s a mistake. Test runs and prototypes can help avoid costly branding mistakes. The courage that agencies and clients need to engage in such prototyping pays off in the long run.
Deadlines are always tight, expectations are high, and pressure from the market and management is usually intense anyway. In the vast majority of branding projects, clients and agencies strive to get their plans realized, approved, and implemented as quickly as possible. Then, on launch day, it’s usually all about mutual back-patting. Relief. A sigh of relief.
That’s when the difficulties begin.
Because branding and marketing projects are traditionally developed by the client and agency in a sort of vacuum, problems inevitably pop up the moment they’re released into the real world. For example, because external service providers aren’t familiar with the brand guidelines. Because marketing staff can’t practically implement certain things the way they were intended in theory. Or because challenges arise in the application for social media, trade show appearances, or any specialized discipline that the agency and client simply didn’t anticipate.
Our client DHL Group, for example, operates in 220 countries and territories around the world. Brand guidelines must be implemented on-brand every day by thousands of employees across a wide variety of business units and roles—including those who aren’t creatives themselves. The chance of precisely planning for such use cases with a brand design is virtually zero. The likelihood of overlooking something important is high.
So we knew that we would make mistakes with the 2025/26 overhaul of DHL’s Next Level branding. And we decided to make those mistakes as early as possible. In a broad-based stress test under real-world conditions, designed to enable us to identify and eliminate stumbling blocks and blind spots as early as possible.
This was all the more important because the evolved DHL Next Level Branding was intended to be, above all, more flexible, user-friendly, and significantly more accessible than the previous one. DHL’s Next Level Branding was meant to be something that thousands of very different users would enjoy working with. But how?
To find out, we teamed up with our partners from the DHL Brand Team to put key elements through a months-long real-world test even as we were developing the brand identity. In pilot projects ranging from editorial design to trade show appearances, both analog and digital. We worked with the internal and external specialists who would later be responsible for implementation and were already working with prototypes of the brand design. Their continuous, open feedback allowed us to optimize the brand design and brand guides while they were still in the development process. And thus ultimately tailor them precisely to the future users.
All of this took a lot of energy from everyone involved. Prototyping requires precise planning, additional coordination cycles, and feedback sessions. You have to be able to accept corrections and handle criticism. Some of our supposedly good ideas were discarded as the project progressed, and many were adapted. Iteration by iteration, the DHL Next Level branding was optimized in this way before the launch.
A welcome side effect: The internal and external stakeholders from our pilot project groups, who today work with the refined DHL Next Level design alongside many other users, seem to enjoy doing so. After all, they helped develop it themselves to some extent.
We ourselves were able to learn an enormous amount about the application of the DHL brand within a short time during the pilot phase. Fail fast, learn faster—the good old startup motto has proven its worth in this large-scale project. Wherever possible, we will also put it into practice in similar projects.
Evelyn Pitule
is Director of Project Management and Unit Lead at Strichpunkt, and as Account Lead, she is responsible for clients including the DHL Group. Strichpunkt has served as the global lead agency for branding for the world leader in logistics services since 2017.
Event: DHL Brand Design – accelerated
The framework behind the global DHL brand – an exclusive look behind the scenes. 60-minute online deep dive with DHL brand leaders – register here (opens in new tab)!
25.06.2026
11am in English 3pm in German