German Brand Award – our way to a European brand

On 04 March 2021, it’s that time of the year again: the jury of the German Brand Award will once again sit down to review outstanding brands and projects in over 60 categories to determine the winners of this industry award.

What initially sounds like a simple judging process is particularly exciting for Takenaka this year, as we went live with the relaunch of the website in August 2020. With this very website, with the support of our advertising agency Onelio, we are taking part in the German Brand Award in the category “Excellence in Brand Strategy and Creation – Brand Communication Web & Mobile” – and have already been nominated.

The relaunch itself was already a very exciting project. Takenaka as a brand is explained quite quickly: an architectural office and general contractor with a Japanese mother, a long history, in-house M&E building services planners and, with over 1,500 projects in Europe, an incredible number of interesting references. The real challenges became apparent in the course of the first meetings with our agency. We wanted to present Takenaka Europe with its 13 branches uniformly on our website. However, our branches vary greatly in size, range of services, and even the types of projects we carry out are country-specific.

We overcame these hurdles together with Onelio, and the concept of our site was soon in place. Takenaka put together an international project team consisting of architects and marketing staff especially for the website in order to be able to meet our content-related as well as aesthetic demands. Of course, the “website” project is never finished; in cooperation with our agency, we are constantly expanding and optimising our online presence. However, we all agree: “We are very satisfied with our new website, which is why we decided to take part in the competition for the “German Brand Award”,” comments Ms Wübbenhorst, Marketing Manager at the Düsseldorf branch.

The German Brand Award is an industry award for brand management launched by the German Design Council Foundation in 2016. The aim of the award is to create awareness of brand management as a success factor nationally and internationally and to communicate brands per se to the public as an expression of a successful corporate culture. The results of the award ceremony will be announced in mid-March.