The background
The pandemic was a time of enormous change. It changed the way we've approached work, the way we have lived, and how we've spent our time. During this period of enormous change, I worked with a small internal team on a full rebrand for Daydot, an experience optimisation agency based in London.
In the midst of everything, the brand was completely realigned and with this refinement came a revitalisation of the old House of Kaizen UK brand. The team worked together refining and executing the new vision, based on a redefined strategic mission.
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With a 17 year heritage in the industry, the House of Kaizen brand had an excellent innings. However, the brand had become weighed down by a complex offering and a long heritage, creating real uncertainty internally. There was a real issue in terms of style and the articulation of the brand's value proposition and what made the business unique.
The ambition
With a 17 year heritage in the industry, the House of Kaizen brand had an excellent innings. However, the brand had become weighed down by a complex offering and a long heritage, creating real uncertainty internally. There was a real issue in terms of style and the articulation of the brand's value proposition and what made the business unique.
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We kicked off with a few key objectives:
UNIFY COMMUNICATION
Identify key audiences and create an easily maintainable and consistent set of guidelines for communication, including tone of voice and messaging.
PRACTICE WHAT WE PREACH
Create a brand that reflects the work Daydot did (and wished to do). To hone in on a proposition that, ultimately, drives more business.
SIMPLIFY AND SYSTEMISE
Deliver a simple and scalable online experience that can act as a test bed for future improvements.
The nuts and bolts
We conducted a heuristic analysis, analysing the House of Kaizen website, identifying gaps and opportunities. Our scoring system informed us which content to remove as well as helping us to understand which content was vital. It’s crucial to utilise this process to ensure objectivity and a streamlined approach.
We also identified five user persona types, through a process of analytics, interviews, and heuristics, mapping profiles around these user personas. Naturally we used these personas to inform the content strategy moving forward.
The next step on our journey was breaking down our personas into user stories to help empathise with the individual needs, desires, and pain points of potential users. We then mapped the user journey across the customer lifecycle, from awareness through to loyalty, to complete a comprehensive picture.
Crafting an identity
At this point it was important to take a step back and analyse where we were before moving any further. Taking stock, we now had a solid business case, backed up with a compelling vision stemming from our stakeholders, and refined by the rebrand team.
Now the next step: define the strategic and creative direction of the whole brand through a series of ideation session. I created a series of low-fidelity wireframes with content blocking to understand the requirements, hierarchy and page linking on our proposed site. As design and content is interlinked, it's important from the start to grow the content and wireframes together, thinking of what a user needs and then responding to that need through design, content, or another element of experience. From this, we worked up our sitemap.
It’s crucial not to get tied to one idea at this stage so the Daydot ethos of experimentation came right to the forefront of our process. Across design languages we utilised guerrilla testing to truly understand which of our creative concepts had the highest impact, iteratively refining the approach. Crucial to this is the idea of being challenged and we ran a full-day creative workshop to refine our brand name and gather ideas on overall ethos from across the business. From a number of possibilities, all created to reflect and encompass different facets of the business, we voted against our favourite five and conducted trademark and availability research.
Testing and iterating
Phew. Our brand name was defined (finally). We had carefully balanced the various stakeholders' missions into a coherent vision for the new brand, building on the heritage, but also what we wanted the Daydot brand to embody for the business moving forward. So our identity began to take shape and the hard work started....
Through an iterative process, identity and messaging was refined, continuously testing these with our five personas at key stages of the process to ensure we remained on track and hadn’t strayed from the path. We checked in regularly with our other internal team, pulling in wider disciplines from across the business, such as crafting messaging for the sales-team which reflected their day-to-day communication and would enable success. Or speaking to Account Directors to craft the methodologies they discuss with clients into messaging they could both utilise and believe in. By reaching across the business like this, we made sure that our brand and collateral was useful, reflected the aims of the business, and was, put simply, useful for each of the teams across the organisation.
It's alive
Exciting. Nerve-wracking. Energising. Exhausting. We had finally made it – the brand was a living and breathing beast before our very eyes. We launched the brand in Q3 2020, handing over three key deliverable which embodied our core objectives and met our requirements set out from the start: a refined vision exemplified in our new proposition, supported by a set of consistent messaging and visual guidelines, with a brand new, simple yet scalable website experience.
Brand guidelines: a compressive set of brand guidelines alongside support collateral for marketing. We were extremely proud of how these guidelines had grown from our brand as we moved through process but also how these could be added to and expanded as the brand evolves in the future.
Website: the new website launched in April 2021 – the visual expression of the new brand. The website includes a CMS back-end, accessible to the marketing team, allowing for easy maintenance and creation of ongoing content.
Design system/Content guidelines: a modular approach to design was continued through to the development of our website with a design system and pattern library. Full tone of voice guidelines, key messaging, personas, and content guidelines, would help to influence the brand's communication moving forward.