How Neil communicated the business value of a company rebrand
Neil is a Senior Communication Designer at Moneytree, Japan's leading FinTech company. We talked to him about how he used business knowledge to communicate the business and design value of a rebranding project.
By Neil Hamilton-Ritchie, d.MBA alum
Starting out as a personal financing app in 2012, Moneytree has extended its portfolio and is now offering a financial data platform for banks and their customers. On its journey, the company has grown out of its original brand, which was cute, friendly, and designed for consumers. Our marketing and design team took on the challenge to design a brand that aligns with the updated mission and resonates with consumers and also businesses.
Early feedback on the results was promising and we prepared for a presentation in front of C-level executives to get the final approval. The meeting went well until the CTO raised his voice. He said that he understands how the company would communicate in the future but he missed concrete data to back up the rebranding project.
“How do we measure success? It may be beautiful but that does not mean anything.”, I recall him saying.
With these words, we went back to the desk to prepare our view on the business impact of our design. At that time I had just started the d.MBA program and I was able to use that knowledge and integrate it into the presentation.
In order to answer the CTO’s questions, my first task was to clearly understand and be conscious of the goals of the company. I identified revenue growth, profitability, and company valuation as the most important ones. The latter one is particularly relevant because Moneytree is preparing for an IPO in the near future.
I did some research and found out that many companies like Uber, Spotify, Slack, and N26 did a rebrand shortly before their IPO, which contributed to an increase in their valuation of up to 51%. This served as a great starting point. To be more specific for our company, I dissected the rebranding project into its components and directly linked each of them to the business goal that it would positively impact.
For example, I hypothesized that the new website combined with optimized SEO and the proposed communication strategy would lead to revenue growth.
Lastly, I proposed metrics like click-through rate, monthly active users, net promoter score, and customer lifetime value that are suitable for measuring the success of the brand launch.
The meeting turned out to be a full success. The work really paid off. We succeeded in bringing business and design together. The feedback of the CTO was positive and our work sparked a discussion about how the company will benefit from the rebrand. We were able to communicate the business impact of our design work, which led to the approval of the concept. Just this week we launched our new website and at the moment we are preparing for a brand launch campaign in fall this year, where we will apply the metrics we proposed.
If you want to read more about the rebranding project visit my personal website.