“It’s a happy, emotional response that this is unique, and different, and effective.”

At their core, every marketer wants the same reaction from an audience that Art Director Luke Duran describes above when referencing a recent Pop-up Pen Holder he designed through Red Paper Plane.

“You guys offer some cool videos on your website,” he continued. “I shared one of those videos with our brand team and I could hear the sounds of delight and surprise when they saw how it pops up. So, right away, I knew emotionally people were excited about this and thought it was clever. I thought it was a really nice vessel to communicate our message.”

Duran, who designed the piece for Montana’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks, said that the state government agency was looking to rebrand itself after more than 120 years of service.

“Visually, we were kind of stuck in the 1960s/ 70s and our work showed that,” he said. “So, we have embarked on this big branding overhaul that’s culminating next week in an all-staff conference where we’re actually bringing nearly 700 of our government employees to one place. This is the first time we’ve done anything like this in about 30 years.”

As part of the conference, Duran said he and his team were poised to reveal what they had worked so hard on for the past few years. They did this, in part, through a branding kit that each attendee got to take home. Inside was a style guide for design, some swag and some useful things to help them embrace the branding and live the agency’s new message.

“One of the products that we wanted to include in this brand kit was a pop-up cube and we chose this because we really liked the element of surprise that it holds,” he said. “A lot of the rival companies package these items in a self mailer and some kind of envelope. I really liked that Red Paper Plane did this belly band that wraps around the cube and holds it for delivery.”

The take-home kit was crafted based on the agency’s four brand beliefs, the guiding principles that define who the agency is, how its staff can live the brand and what the agency stands for to its customers, the citizens of Montana. The four sides of the Pop-up Pen Holder were designed so that each panel featured a brand belief.

“It was a really effective, fun, surprising way to explain our brand beliefs to our staff,” Duran said. “It’s not just a quickie flyer that you throw away at the end of the conference as you’re walking out the door. This really has some presence and it’s a functional thing that can be placed on your desk as a reminder after this conference. The fact that it had those holes to hold pens gives [staff] even more of a reason to hold onto this, so we’re really hoping that our employees take this home, pop it on their desks and spin this cube once in a while to check in with their brand beliefs.”