The challenge
When I met this company, they were BlogMutt. A cute doggo (actually, thousands of content writers) that helped small and medium businesses write weekly content for their blogs. At that time, with this simple weekly-Blog-update technique, SEO improved dramatically and their customers were happy.
As time went on and SMBs across the country caught on to this straightforward blogging strategy, BlogMutt’s customers saw their SEO success wane and likewise, BlogMutt started to plateau.
“Woof,” BlogMutt said. They needed help!
“Winning companies put people first. If you focus on recruiting, cultivating and retaining good people, you’ll see better results.”
1. Discovery to Strategic Insights
I teamed up with a colleague (who I am partnering with to create the branding agency O/G Design Co.) to help BlogMutt with their brand.
The first phase of a branding project is Discovery. With targeted stakeholder interviews and research, we started to generate a story and insights in order to build a durable brand position: the strategic foundation for future creative and marketing efforts. Our main goal was to create a lasting emotional connection between BlogMutt and its customers.
2. Brand Strategy
In an incredibly crowded market, BlogMutt needs to stand for more than just their products and services. Consumers look for human value in the products and services they buy. BlogMutt can leverage this and get ahead of their competition.
We created a brand strategy for BlogMutt, including target markets, personas, competitive benchmarks and observations, market position, key insights, core values and a value proposition.
Core Values describe how your company acts. They also help guide the strategies you employ to fulfill your mission.
Empathetic
Collaborative
Expert
Fun
Authentic
Effective
“Working with Ozzie was a pleasure. Our original brand had hit a wall. Ozzie’s process and strong creative produced our new name and an amazing new brand that helped us drive record-breaking growth over the last 2 years. No easy task in a crowded market. He was even right about the pink!”
After defining the brand values that the company represents, we generate, categorize, filter, and identify a short list of names.
co-lab
influent
leftalign
carrot
verblio
inkui
finemotor
yayco
3line
dexxt
3. BlogMutt to Verblio
The right name distinguishes you from your competitors, creates an emotional connection with your audience and helps build a brand that not only holds the attention of your customers, but inspires their loyalty. A brand is the audience’s feeling about how a company or product represents their core values and culture through its name, design and messaging. It is bigger than the name alone, yet the right name reflects and enhances the brand that it represents.
4. Identity
Your identity is the symbol that distinguishes your company from all competitors and connects with your customers emotionally. Your logo needs to communicate your brand promise and speak to customers at the right level.
Verblio wanted something different – a brand identity that would separate them from the crowded content writing market. Through the bold color palette and the stylized, overlapping quote marks, we arrived at an identity that did just that.
Pink’d
The CEO of Verblio wasn’t feeling the pink color. He agreed it was bold but it didn’t match the brand he envisioned, despite 100% consensus amongst the other 4 stakeholders, Gregg and me. We created some new color palettes and found one that was relatively conservative but still would work nicely for their brand. 2 months later, as we worked on their website design using the new colors, Steve called me to tell me that he had thought about our conversation and was now convinced. Back to the pink!
5. Visual Design
Blogmutt had a confusing color palette that was predominantly oranges and browns. Did they not learn from the mistakes of the Cleveland Browns? Their brand also consisted of literally 10 fonts. It was imperative that Verblio simplify the visual brand with a clean, straightforward look. We created a tone of voice that was friendly, knowledgeable, witty and relatable and an overall visual style to match.
Notice the color palette, sans pink. When Steve decided to go back to the color palette we recommended, we went back in and redesign their visual look.
Verblio had a 3x revenue increase in 18 months.
5. Results
Blogmutt was a decent brand at the beginning but as the content creation landscape changed, they started to fall behind. With a new brand strategy, name and visual brand, Verblio is a friendly and passionate content creation powerhouse.
Since they became Verblio, they have enjoyed a 3x increase in revenue in 18 short months.
Have a project or questions? Get in touch.