CHRIS BRUMMEL
CASE STUDY: AGILETHOUGHT, 2023
AgileThought is a digital consultancy of around 2,800 people whose primary revenue comes from the business-to-business space. In 2022, AgileThough contacted me about running their design and product part of the business, and also to help them rebrand in an effort to diversify into the consumer space.
I was happy I did. Of the hundreds of projects that I’ve taken on in my career, the rebrand project was one the most rewarding.
It was clear that AgileThought was a capable company to take on work in the consumer space, but they needed to allow their clients to see them in a new light — the original brand presented a very competent and technical organization, yet didn’t show off the creativity and passion that they were capable of.
When you work at a company and “live in the brand”, you end up with a ton of assumptions as to where the brand is, but knew that we had to validate everything. We created a coalition of senior executive stakeholders and paired them with opinionated employees from every department within the company to ensure that this brand represented everyone and not just leadership.
We interviewed clients, employees, and strangers on the street about how they see the original brand and how they interpret our competitors. We compared the data we got against the coalition’s interpretation.
TECHNIQUES
The insights we gained from our discovery sessions were invaluable. We found out where we can claim a unique space for ourselves in our industry and how we need to message ourselves to our existing and prospective clients. We identified that there were great technology consultancies and great creative agencies, but very few were servicing both domains well. This could be a value that AgileThought could successfully bring to the market.
This data allowed us to establish a benchmark for the best way to accentuate those details: How do our competitors message themselves? How do other industries handle it? What are the best practices we should account for on our website?
The answers were critical to ensure that everything about the brand is best-in-class and not just another logo.
TECHNIQUES
Our Discovery process led us to a central theme that would act as the thesis statement for the brand: Ascension
The theme is built upon the fact that we aim to elevate our client’s work above the rest and bring good ideas to life. We want to make working with us feel effortless as if you’re floating. Making software isn’t easy, but it feels easy when working with AgileThought.
Looking at the landscape of digital consultancies, we felt it was a space that we could own — while the commercial campaigns of our competitors would promote themselves with high energy visuals and music, we would strike a balance between getting things done and relaxing on a spa day.
With the theme established, we set out to see how it manifested both visually and in our messaging. The slogan required that we convey the sense of ascension and collaboration with our clients — Let’s Aim Higher
We knew that visual themes related to upward movement, arrows, and the aurora borealis are all universal concepts worth incorporating. We iterated on countless logos and concepts until it clicked and the answer was clear that it couldn’t be anything else…
We landed on an identity that was vibrant, alive, and full of ideas. It was critical that every aspect of the brand needed to be holistic, yet each isolated element couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s brand — we needed to carve out our own space in the universe.
We paired ZT Grafton for our headlines with IBM Plex Sans for body copy. This struck a balance between the technical roots and the inspired creativity we were looking to convey.
We created over 200 simple icons that immediately let someone know what brand they were associated with.
Our photography and illustration system was created to put our people first and be simple enough to quickly replicate. We even developed an AI script to allow people across the company to drag & drop a photo to create their own needs.
We developed guidelines to ensure that the way we spoke to our clients all aligned to the ideals of the brand — we are relatable, friendly, witty, and useful.
A brand needs to feel alive. How that translates in video to interactive elements of the website greatly contributes to how your brand is interpreted. We developed robust motion guidelines.
We made an original soundtrack to use in our videos and corporate meetings with the intent to evoke the effortless and relaxing feeling of the brand.
We created a robust “DeckKit” to allow sales people to not just match the look of the brand, but also help them develop strategies for how to pitch to their clients.
One of the more exciting aspects was how the brand manifested physically in our office spaces. We had out people represented as our flyers, which helped give our employees a sense of ownership in the brand.
It always helps to have the team be able to “live in the brand,” and we had some great concepts, including having the t-shirt emulate the flying characters in our illustrations.
The website project was a large enough project to deserve a case study on its own. The site was built upon the Payload CMS to allow for maximum scalability and performance. In an effort to demonstrate the value we bring to the consumer space, we created a unique reverse-scroll homepage — instead of scrolling the traditional direction, we convince you to scroll upwards and ascend with us as a tie-in with the brand thesis. This required a lot of guidance and testing to insure that everyone immediately doesn’t struggle against the last 30 years of scrolling behavior.
We used WebGL to demonstrate the journey of an idea becoming a launchable product. We even had developed new industry-first techniques to make sure that we weren’t forced to use a black background, which is how every other website that uses WebGL handles it.
At the end of the user’s scrolling journey, we took an idea from a concept to a launchable product and raise it through a beautiful and alive aurora borealis.
TECHNIQUES
It didn’t take long for us to see the results of the brand.
Now, here is the bittersweet part of the story — we pulled it off. We exceeded the metrics that we set out and the reception tested better than we could have hoped for. We were slated to have a grand reveal at NASDAQ and the brand debuting at Times Square in New York City, but just as we were wrapping up the last details for the brand, the company announced financial dire straits and declared bankruptcy. They sold 51% to a private equity firm, who quickly laid off the executive staff, including myself. The new CEO, in an effort to run away from the reputation of the bankruptcy, decided to change the name of the company and rebrand again.
For me, it stings, but I’m still incredibly proud of the work that was done — in a very short amount of time could see great results. We proved that a world-class brand could be created with the very creative and inspired staff that existed in the company all along.
Sadly, this page is the remaining artifact.
C'est la vie