DEFINING A META BRAND FOR WORK

Executive Creative Director, Workplace from Meta

TL'DR The short of it, I embarked on a creative and organisational transformation role to overhaul the Workplace from Meta brand. The project was two years in the making involving extensive senior stakeholder management to define what brand means for the success of a B2B tech org. 

THE LONG OF IT I stepped into a creative leadership role in 2019 tasked with elevating the marketing creative for Workplace, Meta's dedicated SaaS B2B tool. My work was instrumental in setting the business up for success to confidently compete for a share in the market. 

I led the positioning strategy to define a brand that packs a punch and clear reason to believe:

When people feel belonging at work.

People feel better about their work.

People do better work.

Workplace helps organisations thrive through the potential of community, connection and belonging. 

THE TEAM & MY ROLE Building a multi-disciplinary department uniquely positioned to understand work and people at work to deliver brand and advertising creative, in my role as ECD I was responsible for:

• establishing a creative function from scratch with campaign creatives, brand designers, production designers and producers
• setting up creative processes
• leading the development of our positioning strategy
• setting the creative vision for the brand
• developing and launching a rebrand (read AdWeek article)
• setting the culture and lead my team to execute on campaign briefs and brand activations
• selecting agency partners to scale my teams capacity
  
• evengalising the creative discpline and my teams value within the business
  

THE REBRAND

THE ASK I was communicated three business challenges:  

1 - Marketing creative had a low quality bar - Business need #1, design excellence.

2 - The audience didn't know about Workplace - Business need #2, awareness.

3 - Buyers didn't understand what the product did - Business need #3, communication. 

But the overarching challenge was crediblity!

Meta is knows as a social tool. How could a product born in the consumer world compete in the land of business? We needed a strong positioning strategy to find our voice in the category. 

THE RESULT We leaned into our point of difference in the category and using our ability to connect people to our advantage, we developed and launched a purposeful and innovative brand with the ability to bring the power of community to everyone at work.

TOV We developed a unique tone of voice to express a clear and confident POV. And we started to showcase the product in our comms to eliminate the gap between “brand” and “product” (hint: they are one and the same!)

The team delivered extensive brand guidelines and playbooks to align internal teams and external partners. The impact of the rebrand extended beyond marketing comms into the product experience, from acquisition to adoption through to retention.

BRAND ILLUSTRATION We developed a brand illustration style anchored in our positioning strategy and brand principles, graduating the brand to MBA level. This was a critical part of the re-brand to successfully communicate a serious B2B brand for work.

The talented illustrator Timo Kuilder helped us develop our custom illustration style based on the Workplace graphic device concept "collective blooming" - a visual representation of the magic that happens when individuals are brought together to contribute towards their work as a community. 

ICONOGRAPHY SYSTEM Working with the talented team at North Design, we developed an extensive iconography system to help convey both functionality within the app as well as brand communication in marketing comms. The system builds on the same design foundations as our brand glyph - simple and understated yet modern and expressive, leaving space for small nuances of charm and delight to feel human.