Highspot Rebrand
June - August 2019
Objective
To understand Highspot’s values and how we want to be portrayed in order to effectively rebrand Highspot in a way that resonates with potential customers and draw more traffic to our customer facing platforms.
Roles, Responsibilities, & Timeline
My role & responsibilities: Research - To understand how we want to be portrayed & test different design approaches
Teams collaborated with: Visual Designers & Marketing - owned the rebrand effort, visual aesthetics, and messaging
Timeline: 3 Months
Approach & Methodologies
Understanding Highspot’s Core Values - During our rebranding process, we wanted to understand why Highspot was created and how our leadership wants to be portrayed to do this, we utilized internal interviews with our executive team. This was done again at the end of the project to ensure there was alignment.
Testing Different Design Approaches & Iterating - Rebranding needs to be intentional and can takes months, so throughout the process, I conducted A/B tests to test different design approaches, from layouts of the webpage to our new iconography treatments.
Process
Internal interviews
To start off, our team conducted 8 internal interviews with members of our executive team as well as key stakeholders. This was important to us because we wanted to understand how we currently view ourselves, what our core values are, and how we can better portray those values. We asked a series of questions about why Highspot was built, how we compared to competitors, and companies that we strive to be like. Additionally, we had them rate how our current branding reflects key attributes such as “Engaging”, “Innovative”, etc.
“I don't feel connected by how we market ourselves. One of our biggest challenges is how do we convey a great product that's innovative with the customers that it will land.
We need customers to trust us in our changes in our product. There needs to be a balance between innovation and trust”
From these interviews, we found that most stakeholders thought that our branding did not accurately portray our innovative technology and quality team at Highspot. We learned that we wanted to appear more unique, approachable. and modern. At the end of the project, we interviewed them again to evaluate how we did.
A/B Testing
I worked with the visual designers and ran multiple A/B tests with UserTesting to compare old brands vs. new brand as well as variations for the new brand. We wanted participants to give us their initial impressions and envision themselves as a prospective client. Through this lens, we wanted to understand if they wanted to learn more about this product, if it’s engaging, and if our messaging aligns with how we view ourselves internally. Aside from open-ended questions, we also had a likert scale questions and had participants rate 3 attributes (“Modern”, “Engaging”, “Unique”). We chose these 3 attributes from our internal interview results as the 3 areas we wanted to focus on and improve.
Process for A/B Testing
Met with the visual designers to gather assets and understand areas that needed to be tested (icongraphy, web/brochure layout, etc.)
Developed test script and ran a pilot test
Recruited 10 participants who fit the demographic of our customer base (sales & marketing professionals)
Conducted study, have 5 participants start with one design treatment and the other 5 starting with the other to reduce bias
Iterate! As we continued this project, we continued to A/B test our new design approaches to fine-tune our final branding
Sample of our old vs. new brand. All assets were designed my our visual design team — I was in charge of A/B testing the assets they were created.
Results
In order to make our brand feel more engaging, modern, and unique, our visual designers decided to use colors that popped, more imagery of the product + people, and incorporated circle motifs that are represented in our logo and throughout the product. Through our tests we found that adding these elements allowed us to appear more approachable and it resonated well with both our executive team as well as our participants.
For both groups (internal and external), we had them rate the old vs. new brand on key attributes from a scale of 1 to 10. The ratings from our internal interviews are a bit bias and aren’t fully accurate since the interviews were conducted months apart, when we first started the project vs. when the new brand was completed. Though, the results were very similar to participants when we did A/B testing of the old vs. new brand. Even with the bias, the change in rating is very large that it shows that we’ve made improvements.
Attribute Ratings - Avg. Score Old Brand —> Avg. Score New Brand (scores out of 10)
Engaging - 6.3 —> 9.3
Modern - 6.9 —> 9.2
Unique - 5.7 —> 8.3
“The thing that comes through most to me is that it's clean & easier to focus on what's actually happening on the page. It attracts your eye in a non-aggressive way. It's us but elevated.” - Member of our leadership team
“The company seems very genuine, likely to be correct from how they structure everything, the website is very appealing and makes me want to use it. The quality of the photos are brilliant, and the stats they include are really good. Genuine, informative, it comes across as quite powerful as well” - Participant
Reflection & Lessons Learned
What I loved about this project was, while I wasn’t the one making the designs, I was able to present to the team how our branding was reflected and help inform design decisions and make my mark on our rebranding process. My favorite quote throughout the process is the one above from a participant; it was heartwarming to hear that the approach we took was “quite powerful” and that we were able to elicit emotion through visual treatments. With this project there were 3 key things I took away:
Framing
By doing foundational research and framing what we wanted to accomplish upfront, it really helped us succeed. By doing internal stakeholder interviews in the beginning, we were able to quickly identify areas where we wanted to improve and discover ways we wanted to measure impact. Branding and visual treatments are often subjective, so it was an interesting challenge to figure out how we wanted to measure people’s impressions, but identifying attributes, rating, and quotes, we were able to assess our impact.
Collaboration
For most projects, I work with UX Designers and Project Managers, and this was a great opportunity for me to branch out and work with the Visual Design and Marketing teams. I got exposure to their design decisions, copy considerations, etc. and by understanding where they were coming from, I was able to better develop tests and deliver research reports that were valuable for them. Through our mutual understanding and respect for each other’s roles, we were able to turnaround our new brand quickly.
Iteration
Rebranding needs to be intentional and is not something company’s can do often since it can disrupt customer relations, so it’s important to “get it right”. In order to create a recognizable identity for Highspot, we tested frequently. This goes beyond just branding, but iterating often can help teams catch missteps early and often, so we can pivot towards the right direction.