Client
Job Description
- Brand development
- Brand identity
- Brand team setup
- Brand ecosystem
- Annual comms planning
- Creative Direction as a Service
- Ongoing consulting on brand roll out
Summary
WPX is a world leader in WordPress hosting with product features no other hosting company offers. Yet, their brand presence did not match the great product offer. Our job was to help the WPX leadership define the WPX brand core and start using it as a company asset.
Our role was to help the WPX leadership shape a strong brand to match their great offering, then help them install the in-house setup that will develop the WPX brand further.
WPX is a global hosting company with an awesome product: they develop their own tech (!), are independently verified as the fastest wordpress hosting in the world (!!) and have a track record of average response time to support requests below 30seconds (!!!). Their existing customers seemed to love them, which made them the top ranked wordpress hosting on trustpilot. Lots of great stuff, obviously.
Despite the great product features, there was something clearly lagging behind. And that was the WPX brand. It was failing to perform as it should, accelerating them to the next level. And so to the outside world, WPX looked and sounded like just another boring hosting company.
- Why should people want to work for WPX?
- Why should clients all over the world choose it – and continue to do so over time?
- What purpose does WPX serve in the world?
None of those questions had a distinctive, clearly defined answer. The company’s rich roots and origin story, its unique culture and spirit remained hidden.
The goal was to form a brand that tells a great story AND acts as a long-term driver of business development.
And so the journey began.
To us, brands are not as static, but rather living, ever-evolving creations.
And to shape a brand means to empower its future development, too.
1 ) The WPX global brand essence
The first step was to discover the key brand elements – the elements beyond the service that made WPX unique. We collected first-hand insights from the team, the customers and key partners through a series of surveys, interviews and group discussions. In a number of workshops with the team, we distilled the findings and formulated brand directions to explore. We used our WPX Road Map tool to structure the key brand assets in a concise format.
2) Bringing the brand to life
To build the visual eco-system of WPX, we partnered with Four Plus Studio. The Brand Road Map served as the connection between the brand strategy and the visual world. The end result is a rich and ever-evolving visual world that includes custom designed illustrations, animations, design elements etc. See the full visual case study here.
Empowering the WPX team to think and act big was a key task. So the first step in the rebrand reveal was to invite every single employee to experience the brand and all its key attributes first hand. The Brand Launch Event was developed in partnership with 121 agency to match WPX’s brave and playful spirit. It started with an adventure and ended with presenting WPX’s very own craft beer – a product that now permanently inhabits the company’s fridge.
Next was rolling out the new brand identity publicly – always a delicate task with established companies with a large customer base. So we created a step-by step rollout, addressing all audiences and media channels.
3) The Brand Team Setup
To us, brands are not as static, but rather living, ever-evolving creations. And to shape a brand means to empower its future development, too.
We helped the WPX leadership design an entirely new setup for their marketing and employer branding development. It is a highly optimized team consisting of both external partners and in-house experts, designed to fit the needs and specifics of the company. As part of that task, we helped the founders of the companies define their own roles in the WPX brand development, as well as to identify and appoint the right brand captain – the person in charge of guarding the essence and applying it in all activities, processes and communication.
4) CONNECTING THE BRAND TO ITS AUDIENCES
Together with the new brand guardian crew, we laid the foundations of the annual WPX brand development program. We used our Brand Ecosystem Builder to create a unified brand-centric plan of activities and communication campaigns that work both for marketing and for employer brand purposes. This way WPX has a holistic brand presence that remains authentic towards all audiences, no matter who and where they are.
We set up a creative team to develop concepts and start delivering ongoing content. We collaborated with film studio Handplayed and director Victor Ivanov in creating a brand launching video series communicating the core values and benefits of the brand.
Having done all this, the foundations were firmly established for the WPX brand team to continue executing the strategy and the rest of the action plan on their own, independently from us. And they are obviously doing quite amazingly.