Overview
One of Africa’s largest IT companies needed to reconsider its current brand territory due to competitive pressures and disruptive market forces. There was also an opportunity to embrace opportunities to redefine the category in an emerging “no code” world.
The Challenge
Current leadership assumptions around conventional approaches to brand positioning in the technology space made it difficult to get beyond jargon to find a more meaningful value proposition that resonated with stakeholders like staff, partners and clients.
Our Approach
We started by engaging with a wide range of subject matter experts in order to understand the future drivers of the category. We then immersed ourselves in the business at various levels to understand the cultural foundations, mindsets and resulting behaviours that the organisation relied on. We then also conducted various ethnographic deep dives into key client organisations to understand the main relationship drivers and emerging needs. Through various interactive design sprint sessions these inputs culminated into an updated brand blueprint that was then shared with various creative service providers who fleshed out the elements at key touch points.
Key Insight
In many organisations there is a disconnect between business and brand strategy as both are developed with different skillsets, toolkits and mental models by people who are either analytical or creative. Resolving this tension from the outset by creating an interdisciplinary collaboration format like a “Hothouse” model insures more impactful “cross-pollination” between perspectives and also allows brand builders to involve other critical stakeholders (e.g. employees, customers) to co-create the brand platform which helps to generate positive momentum.
The Outcome
The organisation has adopted a new name and visual identity. It also created updated customer and employee value propositions on the back of the new brand strategy. This is now being rolled out through various activation elements with key stakeholders.