Good design is good business.
The best brands evolve. They upgrade. They level up.
You might not have even noticed it, but over time brands are subtly changing and adapting to trends to stay relevant. Rebranding has become an important part of the business journey, and knowing when it's time to update can be one of the smartest strategies in your arsenal.
Our work with iFinance is one of our favourite case studies that captures the importance of a well timed rebrand, in line with other strategic changes.
Branding is more than just a nice font and a clever logo.
At Mäd we understand that the branding process encapsulates the entire customer experience with your brand, every customer touchpoint needs to be intentional.
Our brand book includes, yet is not limited to: Colour palettes, typography, usage guidelines, media templates, and meticulous details such as e-mail signatures, patterns, and spacing guidelines.
Your brand is your first impression, and your lasting impression, with a customer so it's paramount to get it right.
The brush shouldn't touch the canvas until a great deal of thought has been prepared.
iFinance represented a forward thinking client, that had outgrown their initial branding. To bring them into the modern era they needed a rebranding campaign that echoed their ethos of "Empowering Growth" in everything they did.
Enter Mäd.
Utilizing our Brand Pyramid, we worked with key stakeholders on their vision. It's essential everyone understood what the end goal was. A large point of discussion was reviewing what wasn't previously working for the brand, and what had to change to ensure future success.
The key element was that this brand had a multitude of different stakeholders, including customers, partners shops, investors, lenders, and, of course, the iFinance employees themselves.
Once the essence of the company was captured, we worked down the pyramid establishing the brand's personality, emotional benefits, and functional attributes.
The essence of a brand should flow through all content. For iFinance we established it was key that the brand represents empowering growth. Once we completed the rest of the brand pyramid, we also established the importance of consistent imagery and styles.
At the heart of the brand book, our skilled design team reshaped their visual identity into a clean, bold style that reflected their professionalism. The previous logotype was brought up to date, with guidelines on how the assets should be used.
iFinance had an overnight transformation that took them from a "me too" market player to fast-growing modern enterprise, positioned for significant upwards growth.
Our brand book is comprehensive so that client brands can flourish consistently. Guidelines are given to keep future content consistent with the brand ethos and ensure that all material resonates correctly with their target audience.
After creating the core visual identity, we felt the brand would be enhanced with some additional elements. We used a concentric circle as a subtle accent to various marketing materials and imagery, giving more depth to the brand.
With the new brand guidelines in place, we organized a photoshoot for the launch of their new website. We worked closely with the iFinance team to create content ideal for their marketing strategy.
Our talented web designers joined the project and worked on a brand new website that allowed the rebranding campaign to burst into life with high impact.
The iFinance website became the benchmark for websites in their sector, and it's easy to see why. The clean and functional layout flows smoothly whilst the brand guidelines can be felt throughout the customer journey.
This new website trigger a significant number of competitors to update their websites in response, and ushered in the age of online pre-applications to the market.
Meaning, they can push ads out, and send people to their individual products to apply for a loan. Each pre-application form is fully customizable, from interest rates, monthly calculation of payment, various slider amounts, steps, max-min rates, etc.
Their sales team then receives leads with all the required information, and just has to meet the lead to close the loan.
Also, we wanted during the project to position iFinance as more of a technology company doing origination for loans vs a traditional player in the market.
iFinance saw a significant increase in equity and loan investments by international investors, and in lockstep with the rebranding they also moved into new branded offices that reflected their step forward, and also then moved both collections from consumers and payments to their various partner shops from cash to 95% digital payments within six months.
This lead to iFinance growing 140% within twelve months of the new brand being released, which gave them a large ROI on the work commissioned to Mäd.
