So now you’re playing with a decent toolkit of skills. You’ve come to see the truth in Ogilvy’s somewhat-annoying quip, “If it doesn’t sell, it’s not creative,” and you’re ready to go build new things. You are blessed with certainty about how to make a better brand and you are pumped to show the world. You’ve also realized that you and your team’s super-impressive collective toolkits are actually not enough. If you want to have a voice in the trajectory of a brand’s life, you need to partner with everyone in the company.
You thought you were collaborating before, but now you’ve got to climb out of your introversion, put on a nice smile, ask the right questions – and then listen very closely. Writing things down helps. As does bringing something fresh from Tartine to the meeting.
Concur brand overhaul
Concur was readying for its next big step in growth, and an inflexible and dated brand system was holding it back. Fragmented go-to-market efforts across the company were the norm, and the Concur founders realized that after a 15 years of engineering and sales success, marketing needed to shift into high gear.
The initial workshopping and verbal work set the stage for later acceptance and adoption. We worked with a diverse set of constituents across the company, to create a fresh, can-do new voice, that at the same time felt familiar and authentic to Concurians.
The visual refresh included updating the logo, a new typeface, a new photography and screenshots style, and a modern color palette. Enablement was via a brand site that included trainings, tool and examples, and even more workshops.
Getting on a path to modernizing the website was a struggle at first – we had to make the case that customers might want to self-educate!
Shortly after this rollout, Concur was acquired by SAP, and we got to steer yet another transition as Concur began its journey to SAP Concur.
For true consumer-tech geeks: Remember the precursor to the Apple Watch, the Pebble? It makes an appearance in the last video :)
Technicolor logo
A french electronics manufacturer buying an American company and rebranding itself with the American name? That’s the Technicolor story.
We were blessed with great clients in both Thomson and Technicolor; they understood the value of creating time and space to play.
We worked with business leaders and technical folks in Burbank, and then with the creative teams in London, along with pretty much every designer we could enlist within our agency in San Francisco and our parent network.
Technicolor wanted to see a huge amount of work in order to feel confident in their decision, and we were thrilled to oblige.
It’s not often that account folks will tolerate a typography treatise in a creative presentation.
Reputation.com rebrand
When I joined Reputation it was in the midst of a name change from Reputation Defender to Reputation.com. One of the early entrants into the reputation management field, its goal was to bring reputation services to the masses.
For an online reputation management company, it had a fairly underdeveloped public website at the time, so a large part of the work, after the rebrand, was turning the site into a purchase funnel for services.
The work involved creating both content that would appeal to various target demos, and also a lot of experimentation via A/B/C…/Z tests.
And in order to develop the creative for all these tests we had to work on culture and process, developing discipline around Architecture, UX, Design and production within marketing in order to move at speed.
We were also responsible for putting quite a few of those branded Amex offers in your mailbox. Sorry for that.
