Since taking part in the project to create a brand, I thought I’d take some time to write about the process that we went through to end up with a sparkly new brand.
Why did we need a new brand?
Here’s a bit of background to place it in context. The Motley Fool is a personal finance and investing site. To reflect the demand in the market, it was decided that the areas of the site should be separated out into personal finance and investing content. The Fool would keep the investing side of the business and the new company would feature the personal finance side.
So the challenge began with the quest for a name for the new company. The process that I’m about to describe took about 3 months just to give an idea of timelines.
Once we found a name, we’d need to create a logo and the website and then the other things that follow in from this like the brand guidelines. We had an idea of what the new brand would stand for and used these as a starting point for this piece of work. Obviously there is a lot of detail related to our brand values, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll summarise them here. The brand values are focused around helping people learn about money management through articles by and advice from our experts – so helping them learn, encouraging interaction between community members – sharing information, and helping people get better at managing their money – improve.
The name
We began with the name and involved everyone in the company was invited to a brainstorm where we thought about names that reflected the brand and what the company did. The names were split into three main areas, aspirational, functional and a combination of those two categories. The brainstorm resulted in a list of hundreds of names. Then the names were ranked in order to narrow them down to a short list. This shortlist was then narrowed down further as we needed to see which domains were already taken. So there was a shortlist of names and these were tested with the public and we got a final shortlist of 4 names.
It was these names that we needed to test further. So, we thought about how each of the name could represent the brand and brainstormed some ideas for a logo for each of them. Karen our fabulous designer came up with 4 executions of each logo and we spot tested the executions in order to end up with a final shortlist of 4 logos.
Once we had the 4 logos, we needed to do some user testing of the logos. So we created some boards to put the logos in context.
Project Boom
Money Map
Love Money
Sort it Out
Due to the fact that Money Map was registered to another company, the decision to select ‘Love Money’ as the new name for the company was one that we didn’t need to make!
The logo
So now that we had a name, we needed to think about what the logo would look like – the logo that we had come up with previously had been just one of a range of possibilites.
After more brainstorming and research, our great designers Ben and Karen came up with shortlist of 7 possibilites
Following more spot testing, this was narrowed down to 3 possible versions. These were displayed in the office and everyone was asked to vote on the preferred option.
The logo that was eventually selected was the final one in the list above. So this option was polished up and resulted in the final logo you can see at the top of this post. Hooray!
Tags: branding, logo, user testing
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