Case Study: Find the right brand for the right product

The Challenge: Find the right brand for the right product

At FinLeap, we found new ventures and thus, have to come up with a brand that supports our business idea. For us, branding is not just the logo and the color, but a means to transport our values to both external users and the internal team members. In this article, I outline our approach towards finding the right name and building the MVP branding concept around it.

The Approach:

Brands present themselves in colors, shapes, words, and sounds. That’s because a brand is intangible. It’s about abstract attributes and values and how they contribute in different touchpoints.

“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.” – Roy E. Disney

The Naming Workshop

 A brilliant name is the basic step in setting up a consistent brand experience and sometimes is the key factor to come up with great ideas like in ELEMENT’s case. To generate the right name, we ran a workshop involving all the team members with some important stakeholders and decision makers.

We followed the structure below:

PRODUCT POSITIONING

Discuss product positioning, target market, positioning, audience, promise,   proposition.

NAME CRITERIA
Agree on a name character criteria or at least priorities: eg: short, long, descriptive, professional and memorable.

PICK THE RIGHT WORD

First input list: describe the company with a verb, a noun and an adjective.

PICK THE KILLER FEATURE

Second input list: Describe the product features and in particular what makes it different.

PICK THE KEY BENEFITS

Third input list: Describe the key benefits that customers would gain by using the product.

GENERATE NAMES

Generate names: Combinations and shortened versions of the input words were common components.

Brand Personality

Brands are becoming more life-like – transforming into personification of a product or a company. Like a person, it has a name, personality, character and reputation. Like a person, you can respect, like and even love a brand. You can think of it as a deep personal friend, or merely an acquaintance.

We use archetypes to help us build our brand. Archetypes provide a shortcut to emotion, meaning and connection, because we already know and understand them.

Here are the brand character´s attributes that we identified after the workshop:

Smart (Clever & intelligent)
Professional (Promise & deliver)
Collegial (Approachable & friendly)
Creative (Innovative & curious)

Logodesign

The logo, based on the square module, has a visual connection with the single element of the table of elements.

The line

The small line generated by the cut on the lettering became in itself a part of the visual design system meant to divide sections on the website and in the links.

The Periodic Table

Based on the idea of modularity, we chose the periodic table as a metaphor that ensures consistency throughout the various marketing pages as well as in some internal communication material.

Color palette & Typography

Since Element is a B2B brand, the color palette is neutral and professional (greyscale, black, white) with a strong contrast color in order to distinguish Element from old-fashioned insurance identities. As typography, we chose Gotham.

Brand applications

Finally, after the whole process, we used the new brand design also on merchandise, office material and other venture specific papers.