Smartsheet Rebrand

Rebrands do not happen overnight. Market positioning, assessment, and forecasting are the three components for taking the current identity and preparing it for growth. If done well, it’s something you’ll love forever. Smartsheet stakeholders are calculated people and to make any overhaul of their current brand, it needed to demonstrate focused thinking.

The current brand utilizes dark colors. It had a foreboding appearance that did not reflect the customer’s viewpoint. The content for the current site was split to talk about business topics and serve as a homepage for the company. Selling the product seemed like a much smaller priority
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The first question after “is this working?” was “Who is doing it well?” I began by interviewing stakeholders in product marketing and sales about who was doing a good job at selling a competitive product. The most interesting thing came out: not a single person had the same list. I expanded this to include other departments to get a litmus test throughout various parts of the company, and again, I had the same result. As a company, we had a problem with defining competition and having a singular voice to address it.

This also sparked another question: “Are we selling to the right people the right way?”

Then, I focused on the features of the product as it’s what the customer truly cares about, and finally found some unity. The product design team had been keeping an updated list of competitive feature offerings. Some of these names I have recognized from other lists, but now there was a singular list that had them all and in an organized rank – jackpot!

To have a broad spectrum, I began collecting marketing materials such as screenshots, OLA, and emails from 12 of their most direct competitors, and finally focused on 4 of the closest in features. In addition to the current competitors, I pulled some examples of companies that they would like to aspire to emulate. From there, a large pattern-matching exercise began to find similarities in the market for photographs, color usage, and narrational imagery.

Landscape and Competitive Analysis

Color Spectrum of the Landscape

Patterns were easy to identify. Most of their competitors were firmly seated in using variants of blues and greys to convey their alignment with the business world. This also continued in their social media posts. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter also use blue and grey as their brand colors, which made most of the posts disappear into the context of the page.  The companies that truly stood out broke that mold. Most of their aspirational companies, like Slack, Microsoft, and Google, had bold colors that did well in being positive, energetic, and standing out on business-focused websites.

Persona Development

It was clear that we also needed to revisit who we were marketing to as well. A lot of our champions were not people who had high level positions. They were brought solutions by the people that needed them, so we rebuilt our marketing personas.

The audience is the most important part. I took the team through a quick persona development exercise based on sales-identified segments. I wrote rough example personas to begin a brainstorming session. I asked the group questions about their life, interests, daily routine, and motivations in the personas’ lives that might lead them to find new software. One of the most unified ideas is that they were focused on things to elevate their potential and had a positive effect on their work life. This is perfect for making an impact in the market by being the first company of its peer group to provide an aspirational message.

Trends in Imagery 2015-2016

I was beginning to to think about imagery to define a brand. There’s several key components in those pieces – uniqueness to the market, growth and availability. To achieve all three, studies of contemporary styles both current and emerging styles were selected for their appropriateness in application for the brand. Next was a bit more methodical. By studying the reports of the the top 4 stock websites as for increase in downloads of these styles, the future of availability of these styles also began to reveal more focused results. Higher downloads means more future work created for cheaper which is perfect for finding a style that works with higher quality photography for the homepage and cheaper, more available options for items like white papers and sales materials.

The first set dealt with color and how it effects emotion. Brighter colors create a livelier, more positive subject. A highlighly saturated focal point against a subdued background enables the focal point to become more apparent. An interesting trend also emerged where light was a character in the imagery that provided context of an environment, a feeling of immediacy with high contrast shadows and sometimes only illuminating the subject in focus. The use of lighting inferrers a sense of in the now.

Combined Styles and Imagery Elements on Accepted Stock

By combining some of the most applicable trends – color flush, light directing focus, and a foreground saturated subject, a new image style was defined. Imagery could now be procured that fulfilled several, if not all, of the requirements to ensure that imagery could be simply selected or created to be on brand.

Segmented Hero Imagery

One of the new images debuted on the site to smashing results in sentiment, increasing internal company morale and increases in conversion to paid user. It was rolled out to announce one of the largest feature updates of the year. The image style was echoed throughout all of the parts of the campaign.

Hero Applied

The new, livelier look was also going to be incorporate in the launch of a new mode for the interface called “Card View.” As this was one of the largest upgrades the company had done in years, there was a lot of excitement about it in addition to the new look.

Another test was to use a screenshot in a light, lively environment. Again, the brighter palette and more inviting, spacious background kept testing better than previous iterations of the pages. I directed a designer to create an image based on a previous design I had created, which would cycle through four of the most popular views of the product in the foreground in short focus.

Product Only Imagery

To add variety to the assets, I directed the team to create several key images of the product screens that could be used in different layouts. Also, I began to push the envelope of the current brand palette to bolder and more saturated colors to make imagery pop out on the page. The company was so charged up with excitement about the new look and lighter palette that they decided to take over TechCrunch on a Monday with new, vibrant colors.

Product Isolation in OLA

Social media announces the new look to the world as it invites them back to the homepage, the Card View gallery, or one of the standalone campaign landing pages.

The workhorse of the campaign was the Card View Gallery landing page. All of the previous shots in the variety of channels lead back to this page to learn more about Card View.

Shortly thereafter, the rebrand hit the announcement email here and abroad.