Tigerspike

— A Rebranding Story

In a challenging and constantly evolving industry, I was challenged to help Tigerspike evolve their brand in order to better differentiate from the competition and target new markets. 

Context

I was Global Head of Brand, responsible for the evolution of the Tigerspike Brand the period 2016-2019. From internally centralising the communication design elements to educating employees and helping them use Tigerspike Visual Language and Tone of Voice to promote our work.

It was right after I’ve worked with Tigerspike as a Senior UX/UI Designer for 18 months  and as Head of Design for Intelligence, Tigerspike’s most significant platform/product for 9 months, that I became the co-founder of a new internal department. Tigerspike Next, was a global team that was tasked to research and deliver ‘what’s next’ for Tigerspike and its customers, creating value through the implementation of Tigerspike’s group strategy. It’s remit was twofold. R&D, knowledge sharing and ideas exploration on one side, and brand & marketing ownership on the other.

Once upon a time, a logo…

Since 2003 when the journey started from a room in Sydney, Tigerspike has some very cool stories in its history. One of the most interesting ones is the evolution of its logo, which after a big redesign around 2006 was never updated, religiously loved by the people in the company but rarely treated in a way that a big brand should do.

At 2014, a clever and cute update on the brand’s language came from Depy Kiritsi. It was a great start towards a unified brand and visual communications system. But the team was drawn back to client work and no-one was left to finish the project, educate the internal teams, showcase the work and create channel to help new business. I had every designer’s first rush when working on a new branding, I wanted to change the logo; but it was neither the right thing to do, nor the right time. I had to find where problems started.

Problem spotting

Unbalanced brand compass

The company was coming out as stealthy, closed, with an unclear message and an outdated branding. They wanted to expand to bigger clients and become well-known in the global market. 

Cluttered visual identity

Historically lacking of a solid branding system, common language, guidelines and elements across offices, education on how to speak like a brand.

Unclear message to customers

There was during the transition from the older message “Unlock the Power of Personal Media“ to “Improving People's Lives through Technology“ although the lack of a dedicated team to work on marketing, wasn’t helping the communication strategy to flourish.

Lack of storytelling and self promotion

Although the company was delivering many challenging projects for amazing global customers, they were obviously missing the exposure. Regardless of the results, the story behind work could not find a way to the right audience. 

New tigerspike.com

The company’s website was where we started. Reviewing the process of the current website, the hours and billable time spent on it, we decided to go with a more flexible and more agile solution. We adopted WordPress as platform, using existing plugins to achieve basic functionality and created some bespoke plugins for localisation and some smartness required. 

The goal was to make the website the go-to place for more than just contact details. We redesigned the whole work section, creating not just case studies with visual but focusing on the ROI and the value of each project. We also created special sections for indsturies, use cases, partnerships’ stories and content marketing material such as Tech Trends or custom presentation for projects under User Centred Transportation. The result was a new website —made in less than 6 weeks and with cost less than £15K— which presented the new branding to the world enabled us to run faster the company’s communication strategy.

“I had another offer for £10K more but, from your website, you look like a great company to work for.”

— Tigerspike London candidate

Simplifying everything

The most difficult part of this project wasn’t to redesign the branding but to evolving in a way that everyone in the company would not just be proud of being part of it but understand the value of design and branding, and learn how to use this new communications language.

An important step in this journey was the creation of a number of mini-sites that meant to be used internally as knowledge hubs. We designed a central one, that replaced the old and heavy intranet, with one where new employees could learn all about the company but also older ones could find information about anything. Others where created for engineering and sales team. However, the most valuable of all was the Brand Hub, a repository of all branding assets, from logo and fonts, to keynote and swag templates.

Font

To simplify and centralise the branding means that we were designing assets to be used by anyone, which is hard, and we were mainly designing assets to be used by designers, which makes it even harder. The most challenging element is this rebranding was the selection of a font that would rule them all. We started with the beautiful Avalon font, a round, bold choice that helped move away from the previous design and set the tone for the future.

We used Avalon for a year while studying (internally) the reactions from colleagues and customers, but it soon had to change. Being a custom font had limitations. We changed it with a similar but sweeter font from Google, Poppins.

This change helped us support more languages, use it in applications were a custom font should be installed, and even use on every document, spreadsheet and presentation made in Google Suite. 

Brand & Culture

Footprint and contribution

This project was not a simple branding redesign, it was a brand evolution. To be successful we had be focused. This is why we pitched to the CEO the idea of creating an internal team to work on the branding and marketing of the company.

This team was named “Tigerspike Next” and it affected the company’s global strategy and marketing proposition. Also, part of my responsibilites was hiring and training the design team to focus on internal design systems and common branding language between the offices.

Besides the basic branding material, e.g. business cards or the website and social media, there was a huge numbers of applications and sub-projects.

Lastly, the logo facelift.

3 years after refining, unifying and centralising the branding design system and language, it was the right time for the cherry on top; it was time for a logo redesign.

We put all the logos next to each other and studied their history and meaning, how the were designed and how could they be simplified. Also, some of the product and offer names were not being used any more so they were removed but we had to build a new system of designing new logos in the future.

Goals achieved

01

Consistent and refreshed visual identity.

02

Clear marketing message, adapted to audience’s context.

03

Evolved and expanded marketing footprint.

04

Globally consistent HR, recruiting and onboarding flow.

05

Easy tools for everyone to tell the brand’s story.

06

Company raised its business value by 25% before acquisition.

“I really enjoyed working with Nassos over the years at Tigerspike and hope to work with him again in the future. I've always been inspired by his work. He has my utmost respect. He is a great problem solver, with such a great eye for design and photography. He really helped to shape the Tigerspike vision and brand.”

— Alex Burke, Tigerspike CEO