Product rebranding: Collaboration with Marketing and Brand teams. My first experience of participating in brand development from formulating meaning to introducing it into the product

Collaboration, Visual design, Design leadership

Meta is a mental-health service. It is a marketplace where clients find psytherapists. Smart algorithm allows our service to offer specialists who will best cope with a request. The client then selects an appropriate specialist and arranges a meeting.

For three years, since Meta has been found, it has been a non-profit organization. The company's mission is to reduce barriers before seeking psychological assistance in the russian-speaking space.

In the summer of 2021, we received the first investment and switched to the for-profit format. We decided that in this format we could bring value to a larger number of people.

Rebranding became part of a business project to move the company from non-profit to for-profit.

By the time the business strategy changed, Meta occupied 8% of the russian-speaking market for aggregators of psychologists and psychotherapists. We planned to expand the boundaries, and in order to do this, we needed strong communication and a clear understanding of who we were, and what, where and who we wanted to convey. We wanted to find a value that could replace or at lest not to contradict the non-profit value.

I was responsible for working with the agency in terms of visual communication and for introducing concepts into the core product.

Business goal — to increase brand traffic to the website

Meta home page and instagram in summer 2021. We didn’t have a clear visual strategy, just two constants: logo and peach colour.

We worked with the agency because it was necessary to build a strong communication system that would help build a strong brand. There was no internal expert evaluation to solve this problem.

In the first part of the work, we formulated the brand positioning: the essence of the brand; values shared by the entire team; our audience and ways of communicating with it.

Workshop for the entire team. We describe values of the company and our audience using our own words; we dream of the future.

The second step reflected the continuity of brand attributes in visual language. I was responsible for communicating with the agency, helping the product and marketing teams understand how we would use ideas from concepts in direct work.

Together with the marketing team, we review the visual concepts proposed by the agency.

After two months of working with the agency, the rebranding was ready. The first implementation platform was the company's social networks. We planned to subsequently analyze brand semantics in blogs, social networks and professional communities: what people unfamiliar with the brand say about us after rebranding; how and in what context the brand and competitors are being discussed, with whom they are compared. We also measure the changes to the brand traffic to the website.

The beginning of the war between in ukraine prevented this analysis. This greatly affected the focus of the team, audience behavior and business performance. Therefore, we could not calculate the quantitative results of the rebranding.

Key message: you need help to cope with your problem

Meta home page and instagram after rebranding

This was my first experience of participating in brand development from formulating meaning to introducing it into a product.