Skip to content
Building A Brand – Base Training Centre

At the end of 2018, MMA Fighter Damien Brown came to Emperor with a dream of building his own gym. In March of 2019, this dream became a reality as he opened Base Training Centre for business. Behind the scenes in the months prior to launch, Emperor helped Damien turn Base into the brand it is today.

Branding:

A logo is the forefront of your business and brand. For graphic designers, creating a good logo requires the logo to be memorable and striking whilst also professional and easily portrayed across all platforms. The Base Training Centre logo ticks all the boxes. It’s used in the signage, the website and social media just to name a few, but it never looks out of place. Before we landed on the final design, we produced a few different variations for Damien, then followed a process of discussion and compromise to come to a final design everyone loved. 

The logo is consistent across all avenues of the brand. For example, it transferred perfectly to the new Engage bags installed at the gym, as well as merchandise like T-shirts, rash guards and gi’s. 

The logo is the forefront of a brand, but there’s much more to a brand than just a good logo. A good brand feels consistent across all avenues of contact with a potential customer, this means all images, text and even colours used need to convey the brands message.

When Emperor developed Base Training Centre’s brand guide, we wanted the brand to inspire feelings of health, fitness and community. All photos taken by Emperor for use on Base’s social media aim to produce at least one of these feelings in the viewer.

For example; this photo of Damien Brown demonstrating a technique to his class invokes feelings of community and fitness.

Traditionally, martial arts gyms have used a very similar brand style over the years, promoting themselves as grungy and rugged. This style is dated and in fact could potentially discourage people who are new to the sport from coming into the gym.

We decided to move away from tradition and build Base’s brand with modern design in mind. This style of branding still portrays the gym in a serious and tough light, but is much more inviting and professional than traditional martial art gyms. Combat is a confronting thing for regular people so our job was to make it as normalised as possible, to increase the amount of people trying out the great sport of MMA.

Digital Marketing/SEO:

After a good brand is formed, people need to see it, otherwise it’s wasted. Emperor created the Base Training Centre website as well as Facebook and Instagram pages as avenues to get this awesome new gym out to the wider world. The website build falls in line with the brand guide, using the chosen fonts and consistent imagery and copy throughout. 

To compliment the new Base Training Centre website Emperor implemented SEO and Google Ads to help drive traffic to the website to ensure anybody looking for an MMA gym in the general area were aware of Base Training Centre.

Accompanying the launch of the social media and website was photo and video content, including the “Opening Soon” video which reached nearly 60,000 people. Photos were also professionally taken by our team, covering the Base Training Centre open day and first classes, giving Damien plenty of content to post in the future for social media.

Damien was a pleasure to work with, he allowed us to do what we do best as well as helping us create something he was proud of by inputting his ideas.

Emperor was great. They helped out wherever possible and went above and beyond to help me create the brand behind my dream gym.

Emperor offers services in branding, marketing, photography and much more,  this allows business owners like Damien Brown to focus on being the face of his business without stressing about the technical side of things. Emperor can help you build your dream business too, contact us today.

More articles