How team Meesho helped strengthen reseller identity with its innovative, custom logo creator
‘A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person!’ — is a maxim that CEO and Founder of Amazon Jezz Bezos swears by. The ‘earth’s most customer-centric company’ and its founder understand the super powers of branding. And creating a well designed logo is the foundation upon which good branding is built. A logo also sends out a strong message that your business is professional, worth trusting and a provider of quality products.
But creating a logo from scratch often requires resources and design skills, which all of us may not possess. Based on this problem statement, the Product, Tech and Design team at Meesho took upon themselves to create a custom logo feature that would help our resellers easily create an identity for their brand, right on the app, in just a few easy steps.
Jaya Jha, GM & VP of Activation and Community decodes for us how a cross team collaboration helped create a strong brand identity for Meesho resellers — making them even more successful (a core Meesho value).
In 2018, we started a new initiative at Meesho. This was called Resellers to Customers (R2C), where we looked at the actual sales process between resellers and customers that happens off our app. As part of R2C we dabble in things we can do to help resellers make the sales experience better, and be more effective in dealing with customers, in acquiring new customers and also in building trust with them.
The idea of creating a logo feature on the app came to us through a very structured problem solving that we did as part of R2C. And one of the factors we identified — given that our resellers sell mostly in their social circles — is that they are basically building a business on top of their personal reputation.
The relationship between a reseller and her customer is very important. And part of that comes from social trust, but at the same time resellers aspire to present a professional front because that enhances the trust factor and builds a real brand with customers. It is one thing where somebody you know is selling you some interesting products, it is another when someone is a professional running her own business. That’s where we zeroed in on the idea to build tools that will help our resellers build that trust and create a brand for themselves.
When you look at the typical components of a brand — a logo is the first thing that comes to mind, something that people look at again and again, so much so that it becomes the identity of the brand. But if you don’t have professional design help and other resources, it becomes hard to get a good logo done.
So this is where the R2C team zeroed in on the need to offer our resellers an easy way of creating their own logo for their brand and to help them run their business professionally. Then we started figuring out solutions to get this done in the best possible way.
Design to empower
There are some products out there that I really look up to. One of them in Canva, an easy-to-use graphic design tool website. It empowers me to do something which I may not have the capabilities or resources to pull off. At least in one case it made me a hero of sorts in a situation which required an understanding of design and the ability to create an aesthetically pleasing collateral. Not something I can see myself succeeding at. And I didn’t have the resources to pay someone to do it. But with Canva, I managed to create something that looked finished, professional and was thoroughly appreciated. It gave me an expertise that I did not possess.
That’s the power of a good product — it can empower people. It can be about enhancing something that you have, but even more powerfully it can be about enabling something you never had.
And if you look at a logo from the point of view of an individual entrepreneur, a housewife, or women in smaller cities trying to build their own businesses, professional help is often inaccessible. For them, getting an accurate representation of their brand, that says exactly the things that should be said professionally, is as difficult to achieve as it would be for me to create an aesthetically pleasing collateral. So, the question was, can we build a product that empowers resellers to do exactly that.
Making our resellers successful is a core value at Meesho, because all our resellers (users) make us who we are. Every decision we make and the ones we don’t is measured by the resulting impact it makes in their lives.
The value proposition
In Product, we often talk about painkillers and vitamins. Painkillers are things for which people are willing to go a long distance. So, even if there is friction in the product, it solves such a fundamental and important problem that people adopt it. On the other hand, vitamins are something that can significantly improve your life but without it you are not exactly dying. Only after you use it, you see its value. But if starting to use it is difficult, then you would never get to the stage of seeing the value. In our context, logo creator was a vitamin. So it had to be really easy to use.
While working on this project, there was one principle we had zeroed in on — that at every point of time, the user should have the option of selecting an actual logo.
A logo has different components — from graphics to font and colour. We could have just built a tool that could have asked the user to enter each of these components as a separate input. But we did not build it like that. We actually spent a significant amount of design time in ensuring that at any point of time users can see the complete output (logo), then they can customise it.
A lot of design and business thought is embodied in a logo. Not everybody will be able to structurally break down that thought into components. But when you look at the output you know whether it represents what you have in your mind or not. So, we made sure that the output is right in front of the user at any time — one tap and it’s there. At the same time they are empowered to make changes to their logo to reflect better as to who they are. This idea worked really well.
The initial research of coming up with components for the logos took us about two-three months and this was followed by another two months of development.
A large number of resellers are now able to create unique logos for their businesses. And only a digital product can achieve this kind of scale. We did not have to manually create those many different logos. Instead, we worked on defining the components and then figuring out the principles of combining them.
We designed the components, we designed the principles of combination, then we programmed it.
The response to the logo feature on the app has been tremendous. We launched it to a certain percentage of our users on the platform, because we do limited roll outs to figure out glitches in the early stages of any feature — a standard practice. Resellers, who tried the feature, immediately started talking about it on our community and they even created tutorials for it. And those who didn’t have the feature, were soon clamouring for it.
This proved to be the biggest validation for the team that our users did want a logo. Currently 35 per cent of shares happen with logo stamps on the app. And this is just within a month of the logo creator’s launch.
The team that worked on the project were super excited and displayed tremendous ownership towards it. The Creator’s success also gave a sense of achievement and pride to the team. The thing with Meesho is that you have this very special set of users (resellers) whose needs you are trying to fulfill. And the connection that these users have with Meesho is incredible. This helps us gain an understanding of and build a kind of relationship with our users that is hard to build in any other kind of transactional product.
And one of the best reactions we ever got from our resellers was a comment in the Meesho Community: “Thank you for giving me an identity!” That is a huge statement! The word “identity” is huge and it is only in the unique environment Meesho has that we are focusing on something like that. The special relationship Meesho as a company has with its users is rare to find. Our users can be generous with praise and equally ruthless in their feedback, but they still stick with us. And this kind of incredible loyalty makes us want to build products for them that will address something as big as identity.
I think our user base is so connected to Meesho that you immediately know what you should or shouldn’t be doing for them!
Want to join team Meesho in building impactful product and help create 20 million entrepreneurs by 2020? Then apply here. We are hiring!
