Brand Architecture: Our Experience in Panama

At Estudio Nómade, we love helping businesses shine with fresh and creative brand strategies. Recently, we had the opportunity to work with Bocas del Toro, an incredibly diverse and culturally rich tourist destination.

We faced the challenge of revitalizing three business lines that were not effectively communicating their value, while also identifying ways to optimize complementary businesses to provide a seamless experience.

At Nómade, we rely on the Umbrella Brand Strategy, which brings together multiple sub-brands or products under a single identity, aligning everything toward a common goal.

Divers Paradise in Bocas del Toro operates three business lines: Bocas Dive Center (a diving center), Divers Paradise (a boutique hotel), and Pier 19 (a restaurant).

The Problem:

Divers Paradise was not leveraging its unique advantages, such as being one of the most certified diving centers in the region, with an integrated restaurant and hotel. They needed a brand that clearly and attractively reflected all of these strengths.

We applied our Nómade Way, which includes analyzing the competitive landscape and visiting Bocas del Toro to gain a firsthand understanding of the brand. Distance is never a barrier for us—it’s an opportunity to conduct in-depth scouting.

We redesigned the brand as Divers Paradise Experiences, aligning all business lines under this new umbrella. We also revamped Pier 19, Bocas Dive Center, and Divers Paradise, and even created a new brand: Divers Air.

This approach resulted in a cohesive, appealing, and effective communication strategy. Our focus was on selling experiences—not just hotel beds or restaurant tables. Here’s how we transformed their brand architecture to create a unified and powerful communication system.

The new umbrella brand name became Divers Paradise Experiences. The term Experiences was chosen to unify all business lines under a single core concept. This word encapsulates the brand’s promise of offering much more than just tourism services, positioning itself as a provider of unique experiences, combining accommodation, diving, gastronomy, and transportation.

Our goal was to centralize all communication efforts for three brands into one while maintaining some flexibility so that each sub-brand could still engage with its specific niche.

We also identified unnecessary financial efforts in positioning three separate brands. By unifying them under a single identity, we not only optimized organic resources, but we also ensured that paid advertising aligned with the actual user experience. The tourist arriving at the hotel now clearly knows they can also dive, dine at the restaurant, and, ultimately, live the full 360° EXPERIENCE.

Imagine walking into a room where everyone is speaking at the same time. Voices overlap, each person tries to outshout the others, and the result is a deafening noise where no idea can be clearly understood.

This was the exact scenario our client faced: an overload of visual elements competing for attention, creating confusion and saturation.

At Nómade, we approached this challenge by reorganizing the visual structure, toning down excessive expressiveness, and ensuring messages were conveyed in a more structured manner. Returning to the room analogy, now people take turns to speak, making the message clearer and more comprehensible.

While respecting the original essence of the brand, we selected new typography sets and designed new associated shapes, forming the new brand identity patterns for this project’s communication.

All logos were redesigned to achieve simplicity and harmony, ensuring that the message was delivered with greater clarity.

This process strengthened the connection between brands, reinforcing the unique experience-based differentiator.

Estudio Nómade’s work with Divers Paradise Experiences demonstrates how an umbrella brand strategy can transform a business’s identity and effectiveness.

By unifying three brands under a single, coherent visual identity and reducing expressive overload, we achieved a clearer and more powerful communication approach. This cohesion not only optimizes resources and advertising efforts, but also enhances the overall user experience, aligning it with the brand’s promise.

A solid strategic foundation was crucial in supporting this initial phase of restructuring the necessary organic platforms for brand positioning. We completed this process by developing a new integrated website and a social media launch plan for Instagram.

We invite you to explore our portfolio for this project, including the website and social media we developed for Divers Paradise Experiences.