The Jive rebrand: What makes one collaboration better than another?
When a company whose products are designed to help people collaborate hires an agency whose work process is based on the collaborative, iterative tools and techniques of Silicon Valley Thinking, you get more than just a rebranding project. You get a new model of working together that redefines the agency/client relationship by blurring the boundaries between them.
That’s what happened when the new head of marketing at Jive Software, the largest independent vendor of enterprise social communication and collaboration software, gave Liquid permission to move from a simple asset audit to a rebranding project based on the company’s newly developed brand strategy and tagline, “work better together.” Liquid was game to run with what senior client manager Meghan Hastie called the “little bit crazy” idea of Jive’s to find artists willing to collaborate on its platform to create a new brand expression.
Simultaneously, Liquid invited Jive employees themselves to participate fully in the process of creating corporate videos and redesigning Jive’s corporate and developer websites — all within just months. “Everything was visible, which is not what agencies ordinarily do,” said associate creative director Jesse Amborn. “But it was extraordinarily supportive and collaborative, which allowed us to move very, very fast.”
The rebranding identifies the collaboration made possible by Jive as the “secret sauce” that makes one company better than another. But what were the four key ingredients of the “secret sauce” that made the collaboration between Jive and Liquid itself so successful?
1. Trust and Openness
“Partnering with Jive was a natural fit from day one,” said Liquid’s chief creative officer, Alfredo Muccino. “Not only is Jive an amazing collaboration platform, but the Jive company culture is akin to our own.”
Maybe that’s why Jive was unusually open to trusting Liquid with the creative freedom to create a more exciting, human brand born from true collaboration. Working with Portland, Ore., art gallery Elizabeth Leach, Liquid found five artists worldwide willing to work together remotely using the Jive platform. Dubbed the “Jive Five,” they were given only four parameters: no logos, no faces, a prescribed palette of colors, and communication only via Jive after the initial kickoff call. From there, they had five days to document and share their process of creating art, then comment on and add to each other’s work in real time, all using Jive. Liquid applied the resulting library of artwork to the many facets of the “Jive Globe,” a 3D shape Liquid created from lines linking all the places around the world where Jive employees work. The result is a mosaic of related works that can be cropped in multiple ways for multiple uses.
“The risk was not knowing what the artists would come up with,” Hastie said. “Jive was very brave about trusting the process.”
Jive stakeholders from every department also met with the Liquid team in workshops to brainstorm brand experience principles and concepts for corporate videos. “Liquid didn’t come up with the idea of collaboration as ‘what makes one company better than another’,” Hastie said. “It came from someone on Jive’s product team who hadn’t even been at the company very long. That really created trust and buy-in from the entire cross-section of stakeholders.”
This intense collaboration replaced formal presentations, leaving the Liquid team feeling almost as if they were Jive’s in-house design team. “We accomplished so much, so quickly, by trusting in each other and the goals we set forth,” Amborn said.
2. Iterate, iterate, iterate.
Instead of presenting a finished product for the client to approve or reject, Liquid actively involved Jive in the process of developing every aspect of the rebranding. For company videos, for example, Liquid turned feedback from workshops into ground rules, which it then handed off to Jive’s internal design team. For Jive’s website redesign, Liquid and Jive sketched out and tweaked wireframes in working sessions, testing and refining the design as they moved forward.
3. Swarms and Sprints
“Collaboration is phenomenal for the creative process, but it requires timeliness,” Amborn said. “We needed to take the lead and create the structure for combining our knowledge with Jive’s so we could reach our goals efficiently.”
One key part of that structure is a process Liquid calls a swarm, or “the no-process process”: an intense, tightly focused workshop of activities for creating concepts. One swarm, which pulled in employees from Jive’s product, design, sales, and marketing teams to create story arcs for three videos, delivered approved concepts and storyboards in just five days. Another swarm, designed to define Jive’s brand experience, involved at least one representative of every department at Jive — legal, finance, and HR as well as the product and marketing teams.
Another vital tool is the sprint, a way of structuring working time and goals in week-long increments. “Sprints help us hit the right solutions, iterate quickly, and give the client power to set priorities,” Hastie explained. Jive’s website redesign, for example, called for twice-weekly two-hour working sessions with Liquid presenting its progress and soliciting input from all stakeholders. At the end of each week, Liquid and Jive assessed the results jointly, but Jive had the final say on what deliverables should be cut or prioritized for the following week.
4. Rapid Prototyping
A willingness to collaborate combined with iteration through swarms and sprints turbocharged Liquid’s ability to move forward quickly — gathering Jive’s input in real time and testing prototypes as they evolved. The end result was a corporate website built to accommodate content that had yet to be written, and a developer site that would simultaneously test the new brand on that target audience while applying its basic principles.
Pouring On the “Secret Sauce”
In many ways, this collaboration was unique: two companies with the same ideals about collaboration, wanting to explore just how far their complementary tools and philosophies can take those ideals. Elisa Steele, Jive’s President, enthused, “We created something that truly reflects our belief in collaboration — opening our process to the community instead of coming to the answer ourselves. We partnered together with the belief that open collaboration would lead us to the answer — a better answer.”
No other agency would have worked this way with Jive — and with an even stronger approach to teamwork developed in the process, Liquid is now ready to spice up even more client engagements with the “secret sauce” of greater collaboration.
Helpful Links
Read the Ad Age article
Visit the Jive website
For more information or to collaborate with Liquid Agency, please visit our website: www.liquidagency.com.
