LifeSG: Rebranding the product as a team

By now, you would have heard that Moments of Life has been rebranded as LifeSG to provide one-stop personalised access to more than 40 government services.

In the previous post, we shared about LifeSG’s new vision to serve citizens beyond key live moments. This post will focus on sharing how we handled rebranding as a team — from working our way around tight timelines to getting sign-off from various stakeholders and agency partners.

Why rebrand Moments of Life into LifeSG?

• Lack of consistency — Over time, we realised users, stakeholders and agency partners called the product by different names: Moments of Life, MOL, Moments, or simply… ‘Aiya, the birth registration app.’ This challenged our product’s ability to scale and drive word-of-mouth recommendations.
• Length of the name — The 15-character long name (‘Moments of Life’) was tricky. When the name and logo are printed on assets or placed next to other logos, it will either be shrunk to fit an allocated space (tiny, and therefore not readable) or risk being cut off or shortened to ‘MOL’.
• New product vision — Finally, we wanted the brand to communicate new product goals and vision. Instead of just providing birth registration or preschool search for families, our product now aims to deliver simpler government services that citizens can access anytime. We needed a new brand name that could reflect a bigger dream and vision.

How did we rebrand Moments of Life into LifeSG?

Once the product team was aligned on why we needed a rebrand, we quickly moved from the why to the how. Here are the steps we took:

1. Align everyone around the same goals and objectives

The LifeSG marketing team engaged an ad agency to facilitate a rebranding workshop back in October 2019.

To help everyone get aligned on the same goals, the rebranding workshop involved product stakeholders, agency partners, design and development team. Our objective was simple — we wanted the new name to be short, easy to remember and convey the idea that the app gives one-stop access to government services.

Everyone got involved and submitted naming suggestions, followed by a few rounds of voting and feedback.

2.Turn feedback and product vision into something visible

Despite the short timeline, we didn’t want to work in a vacuum. Instead of following the traditional client-vendor relationship, the ad agency’s facilitator participated in group discussions with LifeSG stakeholders, partners and design team.

The LifeSG marketing team also worked closely with them to create the LifeSG brand story, as well as the new logo, colours and fonts. During this time, the UX Design team also provided feedback on design and copy guidelines.

Constant discussions between Marketing, Design and Product Strategy helped everyone to work towards rebranding together.

3. The end result: LifeSG

So, how did we land on LifeSG as our new name?

Life — ‘To offer personalised services at key life moments for citizens.’

SG — ‘To help citizens navigate simplified government digital services in Singapore.’

Red was chosen as the main colour to showcase Singapore’s national colour.

We managed to pull-off this rebranding effort in 9 months, on top of the new features we had to build for LifeSG— the ‘Explore Services’ directory and Career Support guides.

To achieve our product vision, LifeSG will continuously work on anticipating user needs and providing meaningful solutions.

Curious to see more? Stop by life.gov.sg for more updates.