Brand does matter, especially for startups!
Language learning comes with all kinds of emotions: anticipation, sense of achievement, motivation but also frustration, fear and a constant threat of just giving up. At busuu we strive to make learning a language a self empowered and enjoyable experience with all the ups and downs on the way. The days where we only relied on classroom teaching are over and so is the focus on mistakes and grading — the education sector is in the process of being disrupted.
The question is how do you convey this vision to all the language learners out there? It’s in the brand… All of us make these choices every day: what to buy in the supermarket, which car to drive, which food delivery / taxi / dating / travel app to use… We choose the products that we can connect and share values with.
Enough of the theory. Let’s discuss how we did it at busuu because ultimately it’s the people and the culture that make a brand. I asked the team earlier this year “If busuu was a person what would it be like?” — and got a variety of replies, all painted a friendly picture but other than that the responses very fairly varied. So if people at busuu struggle to describe us consistently, our customers and prospects will struggle even more. Time to tackle that!
People come to us to pursue a personal goal — they want to learn a language! It’s not just something you do because you have nothing better to do, right? They learn to broaden their horizons, travel or move to another country or communicate with friends and family. They also want to see that language learning with busuu works.
You learn for your dream!
The biggest opportunity we identified was to capture that dream of why you learn and visualise it with much more emotion. The principle we established is to show real images of real people and destinations. These are the places you can travel to, the conversations you can have and the practice you get through busuu’s social network functionality.
This is what the first screen of our iOS app now looks like:
Here’s an example of how our email design changed:
It works!
You still want to make sure it works and you achieve your learning goal. We have had many conversations with our language experts on the best methodology and came up with a simple formula on our homepage:
On our busuu methodology page, we explain in more detail what skills we recommend to practice and how often to improve.
We felt strongly about “It works!” because it is easy to understand and you get a clear idea about what you will get from a learning tool. However, we also wanted to make sure we have some data to back it up. To measure that busuu works, we commissioned an efficacy study with independent researchers Roumen Vesselinov, PhD, from City University New York and John Grego, PhD, from the University of South Carolina. The study found that 22.5 hours of busuu Premium are equivalent to a college semester of language study and that everyone in the study improved after 16 hours of study.
How we do it
To create one busuu experience, we developed a set of principles to guide us through everything we create:
In it together — We are a community, we help each other and go through the joys and struggles of language learning together.
Welcoming — As a company and as a community, we are welcoming, allow you to make mistakes and connect to real people.
Motivating — We help you to learn a language, stick by it, get results and happily come back to improve your skills.
Effective — We give you a simple tool to achieve much, everything you need to learn a language, affordable yet powerful.
These principles help us to check that our design and copy are “on brand” and we speak with the same voice everywhere.
Implementation
A new brand means getting the team excited about it. After all, we are all guardians of the brand in one way or another. Ask everyone in the team to actively participate in shaping the new brand. It doesn’t just belong to marketing or selected people in the business.
Whilst there were lots of creative minds needed to come up with our new busuu brand, the implementation takes some planning and structure.
I recommend to have a clear priority of what to change first, starting from the high volume touchpoints of your brand. Assign tasks to owners and designers, set a deadline and track progress on a weekly basis, e.g. in a progress tracker below.
It’s also a good time for a proper spring clean. We had this very old busuu logo in our office — time to replace it!
What’s next
You don’t implement a brand and that’s it. It as an ever evolving process. This is what’s happening now:
2. Testing
We are running a lot of tests on which images are working best, which claim resonates well, how to best articulate the formula just to name a few. You easily get data from creative tests in emails, in app messages or from testing with a conversion tool on the homepage. Some questions can’t be answered by looking at conversion rates only. For those, choose a more qualitative approach by asking users about how they perceive certain things. Sometimes just trust your instinct! Especially when testing doesn’t seem to have a massive uplift in direct conversion, just follow what suits best with your idea of the brand.
2. Evolving the brand story
Have you told a funny story many times until you found the right punchline? It’s a bit like that. You have your vision and mission that is set. Based on that, you want to associate your brand with certain themes, causes and stories. We have just run a campaign around becoming a “better you” which talks about why you learn a language. For next month, we have a theme planned around saving rare languages and much more to come!
Conclusion
The conclusion is very simple: your brand matters, especially for startups! You choose brands like you would choose your friends, and you definitely want to be friends with someone that appeals to you! ;)
