Becoming the Brand
How Movable Ink transcended from business to brand
It started with magenta. It started with magic.
Branding and identity development is about developing a brand that is relevant and resonates with your audience.
It’s about bridging the gap between strategy and creativity to uncover and successfully interpret the brand’s unique differentiator.
As brand leader of the Movable Ink brand, the majority of my time is dedicated to the formulation and implementation of brand strategy on an organizational and operational level along with nurturing the brand while sustaining its development, encouraging its evolution, and ensuring its alignment with the positioning, voice, and vision.
However, it didn’t start here. A business isn’t born a brand. A business becomes a brand when it transcends its original category. When it discovers its true essence. When it defines its values, voice, and relationship with its customers. When it becomes more than a category and transcends to embody the perception it inspires.
Transcending from business to brand is inevitable and for this reason; its defining moment.
Unguided transcendence often results in an identity crisis where brand inconsistency is soon to follow resulting in a weak, misaligned brand regardless of its aesthetics.
And here we encounter the biggest misconception in branding.
Logo ≠ Brand
Esthetics does not define a great brand. Any designer should be able to design an aesthetically pleasing brand identity. And likely even develop a full identity system with logo application guidelines, photographic styling, typographic treatments, voice & tone; all packaged up in a brand guidelines document or style guide of the like. It’s expected.
However, the makings of a great brand go far beyond its visual interpretation.
Great brands bridge strategy and creativity.
This begs the question; what defines a great brand?
“An orange… is an orange… is an orange… Unless, of course, that orange happens to be a Sunkist, a name eighty percent of consumers know and trust.” Russell L. Hanlin, CEO, Sunkist Growers
Great brands have the power to move people.
Great brands embrace their core essence. They live it; breathe it.
They can replicate it across every touch-point, every campaign, every consumer interaction.
Great brands know their audience. They acknowledge each consumer as an individual. Carefully crafting each communication to elevate the brand and establish further resonance with their audience.
They know that their brand is a promise. And keeping this promise is the key to brand value.
When I joined Movable Ink, the young startup had undergone several growth stages and naturally, the brand had taken shape to suit the evolving business needs.
The transcendence process was in full effect and as such, investigating the stages of transcendence was a clear first step.
The input stages of the synthesis included the gathering of data from a variety of sources, such as interviews with key executives, reviewing available competitive intelligence documentation and industry information in order to gain an understanding of the overall brandscape, finally resulting in the diagnosis of the brand’s overall state as it relates to differentiation, relevance, and alignment.
As the research synthesis phase drew to a close, it became clear that the brand efforts to date had been fully aligned with its target audience, however, the brand in itself was incomplete.
The formula attributing to the calculation of the overall assessment score is that the brand foundation makes up 50% of the overall score with Brand Expression, Brand Expansion, and Brand Authority accounting for the other 50%.
In order to gain a healthy brand assessment score, it is imperative for the brand’s foundation to be complete as it influences and informs all other brand segments.
Initiatives housed under the Brand Expansion and Brand Authority Categories are influenced by a multitude of factors such as marketing mix, pipeline, reach, addressable market, annual marketing strategy, opportunity, spend,… to name but a few. Brand Expression such as ongoing development and evolution in identity further contributes to the fluctuation of the other 50% of the formula. Consequently, the overall assessment score is a snapshot in time with a benchmark range of 55–85%.
With the initial analysis complete, lighting a clear path forward, the branding process had begun.
Magic
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke
Due to the dynamic nature of business, all brands find themselves in a state of transcendence at some point in the growth of the organization. This process occurs in spite of the brand’s level of development at the onset of the organization.
The Discovery Phase of the branding process consisted of a series of workshops with a group of key stakeholders and brand surveys distributed to the entire organization along with a group of our most tenured clients.
After spending several weeks and months conducting further aided and unaided brand awareness exercises to validate all of the information gathered, the brand’s foundation had been fully established.
Not only did the Discovery process inform us of our attributes, benefits, personality, and promise, it also unveiled the brand’s core essence.
Movable Ink is magic.
It is the combination of creativity, fun, and innovation.
Not the witches, fire and brimstone kind of magic. Not the rabbits in hats and magicians in capes kind of magic. It is the kind of natural magic that inspires and delights.
The magic that was Leonardo Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Voltaire, and William Shakespeare. The magic in nature, the Fibonacci spiral, the northern lights, and spiral galaxies. The magical force that pioneers the future.
Magenta
As differentiation is a key component in the branding process, one thing was certain: In a sea of blue martech identities, Movable Ink’s magenta certainly differentiated.
Enter, phase 2 of the branding process: Development.
In this phase, the brand foundation would be used to inform the development of the identity. The visual expression of magic. And with it, the Movable Ink magenta.
However the exact magenta was yet to be defined. As you can imagine, magenta as a spectrum can be quite vast ranging from True Blood to Victoria’s Secret.
This prompted the initial step in the development of the brand identity:
Step 1: Define the Magenta
Our (very scientific) process involved borrowing Pantone books from friends at agencies one lunch hour at a time and snapping a few pics on our phones of all the magenta palettes which would then be sent off to friends in the print industry asking them to print us the exact swatches we had photographed in the borrowed books. Very scrappy. Very startup-like. But, it worked!
Multiple agency trips, a plethora of swatch photos and print samples later, the Movable Ink Magenta was born:
Step 2: Paint the world magenta (Not literally this time ;)
The next step was to define what the visual expression of magic truly meant.
The development of the brand identity system started with an audit of the brand’s expression to inform the overall requirements of the new system. The process culminated in the development of a series of templates, photographic and graphic style informed by the brand’s personality, custom image filter with image selection guidelines, voice, tone, and copy guidelines informed by the brand’s relationship with its audience along with the fundamental brand identity elements such as color, typography, and logo sets.
Next, was to turn back time and redo everything.
This included conducting an internal audit of all existing branded merchandise, decks, SWAG, print material, collateral… EVERYTHING. And scheduling it for a re-design following the newly defined brand identity as a first step in promoting brand consistency across all touch-points along with retiring items that were no longer relevant or in use.
521 projects, 2647 deliverables, 31 templates, and 4960 hours later, a fully developed, consistent, elevated brand entered 2018.
Needless to say, it was a monumental year. By the end of 2018, we launched our visual experience platform, rolled out our new positioning, hosted 20 events in 7 countries, submitted 50+ client awards with 6 wins, launched our Accelerate expert services program to drive innovation with strategic clients, released our TEI study with Forrester, which showed how Movable Ink could yield marketers a ROI of 373%, elevated the design of our website, had record-high attendance at our webinars, volunteered our time and funds to 27 phenomenal charities, launched our augmented reality beta program, grew our partner network to 107 agencies and 64 technology companies, announced a partnership with Persado, maintained 100% uptime for seven consecutive Cyber Weeks, announced our partnership with Pega to deliver AI-powered actions in email, were named one of the best mid-sized companies to work for in New York City by Built in NYC, and hosted 550+ clients and partners at our biggest Think Summit yet.
With the brand assessment steadily growing throughout the course of 2018 and stabilizing at a consistent 82% at the onset of 2019, it was safe to declare the transcendence process complete.
Great brands are built from within and it starts with the organization’s people and culture. As brand ambassadors, each Inker successfully facilitated the transition from business to brand through their continued dedication to the expression of the brand promise. The promise to inspire experiences with every interaction, across every touchpoint.
This, is the magic that is Movable Ink.
About Movable Ink
Movable Ink was founded in 2010 by Vivek Sharma and Michael Nutt when they recognised the need for email to be a more dynamic and relevant communication channel for marketers and consumers.
Assessing the landscape of email, revealed that email service providers were mainly geared toward the infrastructure side of email marketing. And as a result, exposing the need for content as a focus.
Focussing squarely on content led to pioneering the magic that is Movable Ink with the detection of recipient context at the moment of open. The combination of content and context meant that emails could adapt to an individual’s location, weather, time, device… It was movable ink.
By pioneering contextual experiences in email, Movable Ink has powered over 1 trillion content impressions worldwide.
In the fall of 2018, the software company announced a major milestone at its third annual Think Summit: Movable Ink is no longer an email-only company. The major platform expansion would enable the creation of unique and relevant visual experiences across email, web, and display ads.
Today, more than 650 of the world’s most innovative brands rely on Movable Ink’s visual experience platform to create unique, relevant, and compelling visual experiences for all their customers across multiple channels.
