A strategic agency rebrand

TL;DR

Daydot are a leading experience optimisation agency based in London. Using a test and learn approach, I led a rebrand of their communication across product and marketing.

The Problem

Late in 2019, House of Kaizen made the decision to rebrand the UK side of its business. Alongside the head of marketing, a copywriter and project manager I was set the goal of defining a new brand vision.

The UK team operated in a different market, had a different vision and was looking to create a proposition that targeted a specific niche in the market - businesses with recurring revenue.

The legacy brand inherited from House of Kaizen was tired, had low penetration in a very saturated market, and more importantly lacked consistency and clear articulation of its USP and value proposition.

KEY OBJECTIVES

1. Unify Communication

Identify our key audiences and create an easily maintainable and consistent set of guidelines for communication.

Practice what we preach

Create a brand that reflects the work we do. To hone in on a proposition that drives more business.

Simplify And Systemise

Deliver a simple, and scalable online experience that can act as a test bed for future improvements.

Discovery

We broke discovery into two phases, stakeholder requirement gathering and market requirements. We used a wide variety of research techniques during this phase.

Market Requirements

To understand the current state of play, we conducted a journey analysis to determine highly engaging content that would be needed moving forward. A competitor analysis followed to understand industry trends and inform our USP.

Journey analysis
Competitor analysis
Proposition research

Stakeholder Requirements

We gathered requirements from internal and external stakeholders, defined deliverables and proposed a timeline for the project. We then conducted a risk analysis that factored in both complexity and potential legal hurdles.

Stakeholder interviews
Defined key deliverables
Risk and legal analysis

Heuristic Analysis

We conducted a heuristic analysis of the current website to identify gaps and opportunities. We used a scoring system to inform us what content was no longer needed, and what content was still vital.

User Personas

We identified five persona types through analytics, interviews and heuristics. We then mapped profiles around them. These were used to inform the content strategy.

User Stories And Journey Mapping

We broke down our personas into user stories to help empathise with their individual needs. We then mapped the user journey across the customer lifecycle, from awareness through to loyalty.

"As the client, I need to quickly identify how Daydot can benefit my business, so that I have a clear understanding of how their services will compliment my team"

Ideation and concepting

We now had a solidified business case, a good grasp of the market and had identified key stakeholder requirements. The next stage was to run ideation sessions to define the strategic and creative direction of the brand.

Visual concepts

We experimented across design languages, using guerrilla testing to understand which concepts had the highest impact. From here I was able to iteratively refine the approach.

Brand workshop

We ran a full day creative workshop to decide the brand name. At the end of the session we voted against our favourite 5 and conducted trademark and availability research.

Brand testing

We worked iteratively to refine our identity and messaging, continually testing it with our five personas at key stages to confirm we were on the right track.

We presented regularly to the internal team and started pulling in other disciplines, getting developers prepared for a handover that would include a design system and internal CMS.

Heuristic analysis

The outcome

The entire process culminated in Q3 2020 with a brand launch. We handed over three key deliverables, that embodied our core objectives. A new brand proposition supported by a set of consistent messaging and visual guidelines, along-side a simple yet scalable website experience.

Brand Guidelines

We completed a comprehensive set of brand guidelines (below) alongside support collateral for marketing. These were shared to our network and internal team.

Website + CMS

We're due to launch a brand new website in April that includes a CMS back-end accessible to the marketing team. This is to allow for easy maintenance and creation of ongoing content.

Design System

Our modular approach to design was continued through to development with the creation of a design system and pattern library. The plan going forward is to iterate this through testing.