A brand-new company
Brothers, former Philosophy students, and creative agency owners Tim and Mark Douglass share what exactly branding is, why it matters, and how the liberal arts plays a key role.
By Alix P ’18
Fidelis: faithful, loyal, trustworthy.
That’s the objective of the Bryan-College Station branding company, Fidelis Full Service Creative Agency, created by two former students of the Department of Philosophy, Tim ‘05 and Mark Douglass ‘99.
These brothers combine their dedication to faithfully serve people and to tell a good story through branding — a need that seems to pop up a lot in our age of digital-content consumption. There certainly is much talk nowadays about the need for “branding,” but what exactly is it and why does it matter?
Basis of branding
“Fidelis started as a media company, where we photographed for weddings, businesses, and portraits,” Tim said. “Along the way, I started asking my clients why they needed photos and videos created, and I was surprised by how few had an answer for that question.”
The Douglasses are convinced that branding is much more than designing an aesthetically pleasing logo. The aim of Fidelis is to help people discover the core values and story of their business, and then share that story with the community.
“A person who is a pie baker is passionate about baking pies, not communicating their brand,” Tim said. “I wanted to help my clients start caring about the ‘why’ — to help them in the process of recognizing what they are thinking, and then developing those thoughts into a story. Our company exists to fill in the gaps.”
Fidelis works from the ground up with a business: the team starts with the core of developing a business’s message, and from there builds graphic design, website, copy, and marketing. Many branding agencies tend to specialize in one or two things — just logos or just website-building — but the “full service” nature of Fidelis sticks with people through the whole process.
For the people
But more than giving a business a flashy website and a page of good words, the Douglass brothers know that branding comes back to people. That’s why when they partner with businesses, they make sure it’s worthwhile and communicate their commitment to longevity.
“The goal is to connect with people and tell their story. We hope to support and highlight all the good that’s being done in our community by articulating their core message,” Tim said. “We are in for the long haul: we want to help give people a voice, refine that voice to say something good and true, then help them say it loud.”
Fidelis takes the “service” in “full service” seriously as well. With the very name of the company emphasizing loyalty, the aim is to build people up over time, leaving them better off than when they started.
“We are problem-solvers who use the tools of creativity and technology to advance whatever argument a brand wishes to make,” Mark said. “We often encounter very experienced business professionals and marketers who struggle to deconstruct/reconstruct lines of thinking for their brands. That is probably our greatest distinctive competency, and we owe a great deal of that to our liberal arts training.”
“The goal is to connect with people and tell their story. We want to help give people a voice, refine that voice to say something good and true, then help them say it loud.”
Liberal arts is the key to branding
It turns out that the liberal arts plays a vital role in producing effective branding. A majority of the work of marketing is taking what is abstract, understanding it, and producing something real and tangible from it. Learning strategic and abstract thinking takes loads of practice, and is a skill Tim accredits to his degree in philosophy.
“When I studied philosophy, I was taught how to think, not what to think,” he said. “You gain the skill set of being able to own a problem, chew on it, and produce a solution. Then you have to bring that skill into the world in a useful, valuable way.”
A lot of what branding constitutes is people bringing their problems to be solved — and that’s exactly where the liberal arts comes in to provide an answer.
Image via Fidelis Creative Agency
“We use our degrees everyday in our business,” Mark said. “Thanks to a robust liberal arts background we can quickly isolate problems, prioritize ideas and objectives, and then strategically attack the messaging problems brands face in the marketplace.”
So even with all the buzz around branding that we see today, it turns out to be quite simple: applying critical thinking, problem solving, and learning to see from others’ perspectives — all of which can be produced by investing in the study of liberal arts.
And when, like Fidelis, faithfulness is fused into the work of branding, both the digital world and the community around us are left with a powerful product.
Learn more about Fidelis Creative Agency here.