The previous year was one of enormous change. It's changed the way we've approached work, the way we have lived, and how we've spent our time. During this period of enormous change, I worked with a small internal team on a full rebrand for Daydot (formerly House of Kaizen), an experience optimisation agency based in London. In the midst of everything, the brand was completely realigned and with this refinement came a revitalisation of the old House of Kaizen UK brand. The team worked together refining and executing the new vision, based on a redefined strategic mission.
With a 17 year heritage in the industry, the House of Kaizen brand had an excellent innings, solving clients’ issues through a variety of disciplines, including media, a strong CRO heritage, and customer experience, finally landing on where the brand wanted to be with their ethos of Digital Experience Optimisation (DxO). The brand had become weighed down with the heritage and strategically felt like their strong history in subscription would enable them to position themselves as growing clients' recurring revenue. This refined mission needed to be expressed clearly through the brand. The old brand was tired, lacked consistency and had low penetration. There was a real issue in terms of style and the articulation of the brand's value proposition and what made the business unique, based on a long, successful heritage in the industry.
We kicked off with a few key objectives:
UNIFY COMMUNICATION
Identify key audiences and create an easily maintainable and consistent set of guidelines for communication, including tone of voice and messaging.
PRACTICE WHAT WE PREACH
Create a brand that reflects the work Daydot did (and wished to do). To hone in on a proposition that, ultimately, drives more business.
SIMPLIFY AND SYSTEMISE
Deliver a simple and scalable online experience that can act as a test bed for future improvements.
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We began with a deep stage of discovery. It's easy to get lost when crafting a new brand so a strong foundation is crucial at this stage. This process contained two key stages: both gathering the requirements from the key stakeholders, and researching market requirements. We utilised a number of key techniques from a research repertoire at this stage.
STAKEHOLDER REQUIREMENTS
Stakeholder interviews: gathering requirements from the various stakeholders and starting to shape our vision based on both our past and our present.
Define key deliverables: what would success look like? What would we require to build a living and breathing brand? Defining objectives and meeting (or exceeding them) was the brand's bread and butter. This process should be no different.
Risk and legal analysis: what complexity does the new rebrand entail? What potential legal hurdles might be encountered and how could we address these early on in this process?
MARKET REQUIREMENTS
Journey analysis: we conducted a journey analysis to understand the types of highly engaging content we would be required to create.
Competitor analysis: a competitor analysis followed to deeply understand industry trends and to inform our USP.
Proposition research: following on we started to shape and understand who we were as a business, who we wanted to be, and where we fit into the industry as a whole.
We conducted a heuristic analysis, analysing the House of Kaizen website, identifying gaps and opportunities. Our scoring system informed us which content to remove as well as helping us to understand which content was vital. It’s crucial to utilise this process to ensure objectivity and a streamlined approach.
We also identified five user persona types, through a process of analytics, interviews, and heuristics, mapping profiles around these user personas. Naturally we used these personas to inform the content strategy moving forward.
The next step on our journey was breaking down our personas into user stories to help empathise with the individual needs, desires, and pain points of potential users. We then mapped the user journey across the customer lifecycle, from awareness through to loyalty, to complete a comprehensive picture.
At this point it was important to take a step back and analyse where we were before moving any further. Taking stock, we now had a solid business case, backed up with a compelling vision stemming from our stakeholders, and refined by the rebrand team.
Now the next step: define the strategic and creative direction of the whole brand through a series of ideation session. I created a series of low-fidelity wireframes with content blocking to understand the requirements, hierarchy and page linking on our proposed site. As design and content is interlinked, it's important from the start to grow the content and wireframes together, thinking of what a user needs and then responding to that need through design, content, or another element of experience. From this, we worked up our sitemap.
It’s crucial not to get tied to one idea at this stage so the Daydot ethos of experimentation came right to the forefront of our process. Across design languages we utilised guerrilla testing to truly understand which of our creative concepts had the highest impact, iteratively refining the approach. Crucial to this is the idea of being challenged and we ran a full-day creative workshop to refine our brand name and gather ideas on overall ethos from across the business. From a number of possibilities, all created to reflect and encompass different facets of the business, we voted against our favourite five and conducted trademark and availability research.
Phew. Our brand name was defined (finally). We had carefully balanced the various stakeholders' missions into a coherent vision for the new brand, building on the heritage, but also what we wanted the Daydot brand to embody for the business moving forward. So our identity began to take shape and the hard work started....
Through an iterative process, identity and messaging was refined, continuously testing these with our five personas at key stages of the process to ensure we remained on track and hadn’t strayed from the path. We checked in regularly with our other internal team, pulling in wider disciplines from across the business, such as crafting messaging for the sales-team which reflected their day-to-day communication and would enable success. Or speaking to Account Directors to craft the methodologies they discuss with clients into messaging they could both utilise and believe in. By reaching across the business like this, we made sure that our brand and collateral was useful, reflected the aims of the business, and was, put simply, useful for each of the teams across the organisation.
Exciting. Nerve-wracking. Energising. Exhausting. We had finally made it – the brand was a living and breathing beast before our very eyes. We launched the brand in Q3 2020, handing over three key deliverable which embodied our core objectives and met our requirements set out from the start: a refined vision exemplified in our new proposition, supported by a set of consistent messaging and visual guidelines, with a brand new, simple yet scalable website experience.
Brand guidelines: a compressive set of brand guidelines alongside support collateral for marketing. We were extremely proud of how these guidelines had grown from our brand as we moved through process but also how these could be added to and expanded as the brand evolves in the future.
Website: the new website launched in April 2021 – the visual expression of the new brand. The website includes a CMS back-end, accessible to the marketing team, allowing for easy maintenance and creation of ongoing content.
Design system/Tone of voice: a modular approach to design was continued through to the development of our website with a design system and pattern library. Full tone of voice guidelines, key messaging, personas, and content guidelines, would help influence the brand's communication moving forward.
I'm incredibly proud of what we achieved with the rebranding of House of Kaizen to Daydot. It’s fantastic that even through a time of disconnection in the working world, the team is more connected and aligned than ever before. It’s a joy to see the new company values guide the way that Daydot approach their work each day. The project inspired confidence in the design and marketing teams, ushering in a brand new era at Daydot.