A New Season, A New Brand

Posted on Tuesday 03 Apr 2007

The Williams brand has been updated to coincide with a new dawn for the team with the arrival of 2007. To shed some light on the concepts behind the new logos associated with Williams, we spoke to the team’s Head of Marketing, Scott Garrett. What's happening with the Williams brand? The new logo is the new identity of Williams Grand Prix Engineering Limited and it replaces the logo that we used during the 2006 season in the period immediately following the dissolution of our partnership with BMW. While there were many who liked our 2006 identity, it was felt that we needed something that better reflected our values as a company and as a team. The 2006 logo, with its stylised F1 device, did a great job of reflecting what we do, but did not really express who we are. So with the help of our design partners, we created the “roundel device� with the following thoughts in mind: 1) Williams is who we are. Let's get the W back
2) Make it look engineered – it’s derived from solid titanium
3) It must look good on the front of a car. Cars are what we do
4) It must make us proud We hope you like the new identity and, like us, see it as a positive step towards redefining our identity as Williams F1. The Roundel isn’t the only new logo, is it? No it's not. We've extended our re-design to include the RBS Williams F1 Conference Centre and we’ve also developed a special new identity for our race and test teams to reflect our title partnership with AT&T. This racing logo is effectively a sub-brand of Williams F1. The roundel device appears in it, linking the two. Isn’t that a bit confusing? It may seem complicated to have two new brand identities, but we wanted to create an identity for our company that could last ten years or more while we also needed a racing brand that incorporates AT&T.