Reshaping a brand's look & feel
It’s not often that you get a chance to see a brand grow from its infancy. It’s even rarer to get to work on building it -- and then rebuilding it as it grows beyond what you’d initially imagined possible.
At the end of 2022, we realized that ZayZoon had outgrown its teal gradient confines and needed a makeover. I collaborated with key members of the team and oversaw the new brand's in-house creation and implementation across all our channels.
Staying true to our values
As a mission-driven company, it was of the essence to maintain the core elements of our brand whilst expanding its capabilities. ZayZoon's Content Style Guide focused on the fact that we were trustworthy, approachable, knowledgeable, and clear. We were also honest, sincere, empathetic, and compassionate.
Yet the existing branding (which was fun and slick) needed to expand to represent these sentiments more clearly. As the team grew, we also started to see the limitations on the ease of use by extended team members. So we set to redesign it.
The process
I worked with ZayZoon's product designer, Victor Platon to envision all the brand elements to help us tell that story. We incorporated warmer tones and stayed true to our brand colour: teal. From this, we expanded.
I conducted thorough market research and we started to design the key building blocks of ZayZoon's new identity.
This included:
- New messaging for our brand
- Colour palette
- New logo and icon
- Updated fonts
- Icons and illustrations
- Stock photography guidelines
- New phone mockups for our app
- and so much more.
The brand book
Brand stewardship
Once the brand elements were consolidated and promoted throughout the company, I worked on implementing it throughout our channels. This included a lot of coordination with different departments, collaboration with multiple stakeholders, and an entire website redesign.
I collaborated with the Content Director and the Director of Digital Marketing to ensure that the brand was deployed through the new site infrastructure seamlessly and then worked my way through all company marketing assets, updating their look, messaging, and graphics.
These included datasheets, slide decks, event collateral, posters, email templates, product mockups, reports, video templates, partner documents, and a lot more.
It also included a training element through which we built the necessary "Lego pieces" to make the brand accessible to the rest of the team so the design process was not a bottleneck for the organization.
Leveraging our team
On top of ensuring that our brand looked and sounded "the right way" through our official channels, I also worked with the growth team to provide sales reps and CSRs with the right materials for them to share the ZayZoon story on their channels and expand our content.
These efforts led to our content to be viewed by thousands of extra eyes on LinkedIn and performance for our blogs, reports, guides and proprietary research to increase noticeably.
A deeper dive into our audiences
To expand our understanding of our audiences, we developed a cross-functional team to conduct primary research on our two main personas: employers and customers. This included people both within the ZayZoon ecosystem as lookalike audiences found through Respondent.
We also tapped into the extensive user base through our app and conducted surveys with thousands of ZayZoon customers to understand their journey better.
This was an invaluable way to further our Marketing strategy and ensure that we were moving in the right direction to serve our audiences, rather than just creating based on our opinions alone.
After this exercise concluded, I continued diving deeper into the employer persona which encompassed business owners and HR leaders in SMBs. I was able to become the subject matter expert at ZayZoon in this persona and implement these insights into an array of projects, as well as much of my writing.
