Reimagining the Groupon Merchant Brand
Over a year ago, the Groupon Merchant Design team was tasked with reimagining the Groupon Merchant Brand. Why the concern with a merchant facing brand you ask? Well, for one, Groupon Merchants are the engine that drives the Groupon Marketplace, so it’s important for us and Groupon to speak directly to and re-energize our valuable merchants. Plus, Merchants are customers too, so why not deliver top quality designs and experiences to them as well.
So, we set out to overhaul a dated brand and visual system with one that connects with Merchants, inspires them, and hopefully convinces them to keep working with us.
We began with the identity and what seemed like endless ideation. We began with a naming exercise and landed on GrouponMerchant. True it’s not sexy, but it’s clear, functional, and unassuming, so we decided to own it and make the most of it. Sketches, mocks, reviews, more sketches, more mocks, more reviews. Repeat. The team included business owners, three designers and a few from marketing and brand…a small group that was empowered and worked well together.
What resulted was the mark we call Mpetus. A simple mark—with a nod to performance visualization as the Merchant—when partnered with Groupon, it delivers the results. Also…behind the scenes, the “M” of the Merchant, the heart and soul behind what makes this all work.
And last, some of the final detailing that we as designers nerd out on to ensure the mark and typography expand and contract to the largest and smallest formats:
Photography
We shifted focus to other elements of communication, photography, iconography, and illustration, etc. For photography, we wanted to shift the focus to real merchants inside their spaces. We evaluated a lot of B2B brands and how they used photography, and discovered that, in order to differentiate, we needed to avoid the ubiquitous front angle shot of a happy merchant. Overused by most of our competitors, we focused on using real Groupon Merchants and sent our team of in-house photographers in Chicago as well as one commissioned photographer in San Francisco into Merchants’ retail spaces, shooting merchants and customers, their business environments, close-ups of their products and services. The results are genuine and believable—two of our defining attributes.
One of the signature elements of our efforts was showing the Merchants in their space, not staged and contrived in a studio or on a white background. We also made an effort to move the camera in on the hands of the craftsmen, showing close-ups of Sushi chefs crafting a sushi-roll, or of the aquarium tour guide showing a shark-jaw to wide-eyed children. All in an effort to show real Groupon Merchants in action, performing the craft they’ve devoted their lives to.
Iconography
On to the icons…a design element we use a lot as designers to quickly communicate at a glance to our busy Merchant. We had a pretty extensive library of existing icons so this was an exercise in defining our visual style, then interpreting that style to our existing set—sometimes redefining metaphors, and others just re-skinning existing icons. After much exploration we settled on a simple outline style utilizing two primary colors, a consistent stroke width, and gap. At smaller sizes, we reduced to one color and a smaller gap. The gap, we felt, gave us differentiation and the colors and reduced style complement our brand language.
With the visual design language established, creating additional icons is just a matter of determining the correct metaphor and then producing it to our specifications. The new set is a work-in-progress and continues to grow as we build out our product offerings.
Illustrations
After establishing the iconography guidelines, the illustration style just fell into place. We leveraged the icon rules and extrapolated it onto a larger canvas. The illustrations are extensions of the icons and are used to further visually communicate concepts that might be more challenging to understand. We use them consistently within product and feature sections of our marketing site to help solidify the benefits and value proposition from any given product.
All Together
With the major branding elements in place—logo, typography, colors, photography, iconography, and illustration—the core branding building blocks are ready to be extended out to a system even more complex. The “impetus” for the initial work was primarily to redo our outdated marketing site. But this design language will extend much farther beyond just marketing communications; it’s now informing our UI pattern library where we’re currently reimagining our UI patterns that make up the vast and varied toolset we provide to our merchants. All of this anew…as we continue to reimagine and improve the Groupon Merchant experience.
See it all at work on our new site www.groupon.com/merchant
Special thanks to Raza Durrani, David Gómez-Rosado, Eric Knox, Andrew L. Sandler, Ivan Garcia Maya, Stephen Bayatte, Kelley Fraser, and Sarah Kitson for the amazing effort thus far! Stay tuned, much more to come.
Mat Van Orden is a Product Designer for all things Groupon Merchant. Outside of work he can be seen chasing little people around neighborhood soccer fields searching for Pokemon’s.
Want to work with us? Browse our current job listings or learn more about us at Groupon Design Union.
P.S. — Thanks for reading! If you found value in this, I’d really appreciate it if you could recommend this post by clicking the ❤ button below so other people can see it.
