Bringing their events’ energy to their brand.
Motus Experiential Upgrades its Image
The Situation
An ambitious new marketing director attends an impressive outdoor festival while visiting Boston. It inspires him to create a similar spectacle for his brand. He searches for Motus Experiential, the firm that brought it to life, and lands on their website. It boasts, “Your Brand in Motion,” but looks static, untouched, and uninspired. The color palette was subdued, the logo static, and the imagery primarily stock.
Founder Scott Halstead built Motus over more than twenty years into an agency with an impressive track record: outdoor events topping 100,000 attendees, donor experiences that raised thousands for nonprofit partners, an educational program that reached more than 13,000 students across three states.
Like many agency founders, Halstead put most of his energy and creativity into delivering marketing wins for his clients. For himself? Not so much. In fact, a messaging audit found the Motus positioning nearly indistinguishable from several direct competitors and rated its visual identity a 2.5 out of 5 for uniqueness.
Worse than that disconnect, that same marketing director walked away assuming Motus was a small, Boston-only firm—not the kind of shop he could trust with larger or national work.
An ambitious new marketing director attends an impressive outdoor festival while visiting Boston. It inspires him to create a similar spectacle for his brand. He searches for Motus Experiential, the firm that brought it to life, and lands on their website. It boasts, “Your Brand in Motion,” but looks static, untouched, and uninspired. The color palette was subdued, the logo static, and the imagery primarily stock.
Founder Scott Halstead built Motus over more than twenty years into an agency with an impressive track record: outdoor events topping 100,000 attendees, donor experiences that raised thousands for nonprofit partners, an educational program that reached more than 13,000 students across three states.
Like many agency founders, Halstead put most of his energy and creativity into delivering marketing wins for his clients. For himself? Not so much. In fact, a messaging audit found the Motus positioning nearly indistinguishable from several direct competitors and rated its visual identity a 2.5 out of 5 for uniqueness.
Worse than that disconnect, that same marketing director walked away assuming Motus was a small, Boston-only firm—not the kind of shop he could trust with larger or national work.
The Approach
Enter Spencer Brenneman and their three-phase Ask, Build, and Connect methodology.
ASK
The messaging audit benchmarked Motus against competing agencies on positioning, tone, and visual presentation, paired with a series of client interviews. The goal: separate legitimate competitive gaps from outdated assumptions and surface, in clients’ own words, what actually made Motus different.
BUILD
That research produced the Motus Focus & Messaging Framework, held together by the brand’s new promise: “The most powerful moments happen when people genuinely connect.” Three distinctive pillars support that promise:
- Leader Access. Direct contact with the person ultimately responsible for the work.
- Fast and Factual. Closing the distance between idea and execution without sacrificing precision.
- Curated Network. A decades-deep bench of specialists assembled project by project, rather than a fixed in-house staff.
Updated personality attributes bring the brand to life in an authentic, memorable, and differentiated way:
- Pragmatic. We combine confidence with a healthy dose of realism to make better decisions, faster.
- Transparent. We share what we know when we know it.
- Connected. Decades of trusted relationships mean the partners perfect for your events are a phone call away.
- Relatable. We’re colleagues, not vendors. We get your pressures, we respect your time, and we enjoy the work we do with you.
CONNECT
The Focus & Messaging Framework guides every element of the Connect phase, where Spencer Brenneman ties clients’ updated brand to their real-world needs. For Motus Experiential, that began with a verbal toolkit and elevator pitches built for three distinct audiences—PR agencies, marketing teams, and nonprofits and associations. Each opens with the same core positioning and closes with a line specific to what that audience needs most.
Next came a new website wireframe and the copy to fill it, built to retire the idea that Motus is a small, Boston-only firm for good.
On the visual side, Senior Art Director Kim Vanni led development of an updated animated logo, color system, and motion treatment. Kim’s approach produced multiple logo directions, sequenced deliberately from conservative to ambitious, so Scott could react to a full range of options instead of anchoring on the safest one first.
“The events Motus creates are exciting and immersive, but their brand looked too corporate and flat,” she says. “We brought it to life with a bold new logo, vibrant colors, and subtle parallax effects that capture the energy and excitement they bring to every event. I love working with all of our clients, but this project was especially fun because we got to do for Motus what they do for their own clients—bring an idea to life and make it something people want to be part of.”
The selected concept builds the letterform from interlocking, “snapping” pieces—a nod to how Motus assembles a curated team for each project. Color overlays reinforce the transparency for which Motus is known and gradient-based color treatments carry a sense of motion across the logo, website, and presentation materials alike.
Color exploration deliberately avoided a large, fixed palette. Instead, a small set of colors and gradients was designed to let event photography do most of the visual work, with the existing gray retained as a connecting thread to the brand people already knew.
The same direction extended to the website. Under Kim’s direction, the Spencer Brenneman team built detailed Figma files for Motus Experiential’s web developer to implement.
As with all visual rebrands, Spencer Brenneman delivered a full brand guide to protect the brand long-term. For Motus, that guide also included a mobile-ready quick reference for taking professional-grade photographs with a smartphone. Now, the people working Motus events on the ground have the power to capture the moments where people were genuinely connecting with each other and the sponsors in the room.
Enter Spencer Brenneman and their three-phase Ask, Build, and Connect methodology.
ASK
The messaging audit benchmarked Motus against competing agencies on positioning, tone, and visual presentation, paired with a series of client interviews. The goal: separate legitimate competitive gaps from outdated assumptions and surface, in clients’ own words, what actually made Motus different.
BUILD
That research produced the Motus Focus & Messaging Framework, held together by the brand’s new promise: “The most powerful moments happen when people genuinely connect.” Three distinctive pillars support that promise:
- Leader Access. Direct contact with the person ultimately responsible for the work.
- Fast and Factual. Closing the distance between idea and execution without sacrificing precision.
- Curated Network. A decades-deep bench of specialists assembled project by project, rather than a fixed in-house staff.
Updated personality attributes bring the brand to life in an authentic, memorable, and differentiated way:
- Pragmatic. We combine confidence with a healthy dose of realism to make better decisions, faster.
- Transparent. We share what we know when we know it.
- Connected. Decades of trusted relationships mean the partners perfect for your events are a phone call away.
- Relatable. We’re colleagues, not vendors. We get your pressures, we respect your time, and we enjoy the work we do with you.
CONNECT
The Focus & Messaging Framework guides every element of the Connect phase, where Spencer Brenneman ties clients’ updated brand to their real-world needs. For Motus Experiential, that began with a verbal toolkit and elevator pitches built for three distinct audiences—PR agencies, marketing teams, and nonprofits and associations. Each opens with the same core positioning and closes with a line specific to what that audience needs most.
Next came a new website wireframe and the copy to fill it, built to retire the idea that Motus is a small, Boston-only firm for good.
On the visual side, Senior Art Director Kim Vanni led development of an updated animated logo, color system, and motion treatment. Kim’s approach produced multiple logo directions, sequenced deliberately from conservative to ambitious, so Scott could react to a full range of options instead of anchoring on the safest one first.
“The events Motus creates are exciting and immersive, but their brand looked too corporate and flat,” she says. “We brought it to life with a bold new logo, vibrant colors, and subtle parallax effects that capture the energy and excitement they bring to every event. I love working with all of our clients, but this project was especially fun because we got to do for Motus what they do for their own clients—bring an idea to life and make it something people want to be part of.”
The selected concept builds the letterform from interlocking, “snapping” pieces—a nod to how Motus assembles a curated team for each project. Color overlays reinforce the transparency for which Motus is known and gradient-based color treatments carry a sense of motion across the logo, website, and presentation materials alike.
Color exploration deliberately avoided a large, fixed palette. Instead, a small set of colors and gradients was designed to let event photography do most of the visual work, with the existing gray retained as a connecting thread to the brand people already knew.
The same direction extended to the website. Under Kim’s direction, the Spencer Brenneman team built detailed Figma files for Motus Experiential’s web developer to implement.
As with all visual rebrands, Spencer Brenneman delivered a full brand guide to protect the brand long-term. For Motus, that guide also included a mobile-ready quick reference for taking professional-grade photographs with a smartphone. Now, the people working Motus events on the ground have the power to capture the moments where people were genuinely connecting with each other and the sponsors in the room.
The Result
The look, the language, and the website now align with how Motus Experiential delivers for its clients: with pragmatism, professionalism, and transparency.
“Working with Spencer Brenneman was a straightforward process. Every step along the way was logical, well-executed, and exactly what I was looking for. I couldn’t be happier with the outcome and have already referred them to partners who could use their help.”
Spencer Brenneman’s Ask, Build, and Connect methodology gave Motus Experiential clear differentiation and a roadmap to build its business and its brand.
The look, the language, and the website now align with how Motus Experiential delivers for its clients: with pragmatism, professionalism, and transparency.
“Working with Spencer Brenneman was a straightforward process. Every step along the way was logical, well-executed, and exactly what I was looking for. I couldn’t be happier with the outcome and have already referred them to partners who could use their help.”
Spencer Brenneman’s Ask, Build, and Connect methodology gave Motus Experiential clear differentiation and a roadmap to build its business and its brand.
