What Shipped: “You must be this old to Tweet”
Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.
Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:
- Defining a role after 2 years in the job
Grace celebrated her two year anniversary at Future Super and celebrated by writing down why we have a Chief Marketing Officer. - Reflecting on our socials
Grace and Mariela reflect on the growth of the team and Future Super’s social media presence over the last 18 months — and look to how the role will change going forward. - Helping the rest of the business see what we mean by brand
We got some feedback that other teams don’t know what our brand is, so they can’t act on it. That’s a barrier if we want to build a brand that lives on every touchpoint a member will experience. - Building a story, not guidelines.
A realisation that a traditional set of guidelines won’t work for how we are building the visual identity, so we came up with something new.
Defining A Role After Two Years In The Job
Grace had her two year anniversary at Future Super and celebrated by defining why we have a Chief Marketing Officer.
Have you ever walked into a job and known exactly what you were actually going to do?! Me neither, and I don’t think many people have. When you start leading teams and getting into managerial roles, I find it even more amorphous.
As the marketing team has changed significantly since I’ve started, lately I’ve been feeling like my role also needs to change. But I had a problem. I am not a fan of words like management, align, steer, direct, guide. They don’t give me clarity on what I should give energy to, what I shouldn’t, where I should make calls (beyond my gut), and where I should be bringing others in. So I set myself a challenge: explain what a Chief Marketing Officer does without using corporate jargon. Make it something I can use as a person already acting in this role and try to voice the value I bring to the business beyond the output I, with others, create.
I did a bit of Googling and it seemed like no one else had done it. The majority of the definitions I found for Chief Marketing Officer used words that my late grandmother who had a Masters in Teaching & English but never worked in a for-profit company would understand.
Example: “A chief marketing officer (CMO), also called a global marketing officer or marketing director, is a corporate executive responsible for marketing activities in an organization.”
Feels like a definition with the word in it. It took me at least four back-and-forths to get it to a point that I can see being useful with feedback that included questions like “What does align mean here?”
TBH I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with it now. My next steps are to share it with the people on my team both in marketing and Future Super’s leadership to see if it makes my focus even more clear or if there’s further refining I can do so I’m always clear on the job I am here to do.
Here it is if you want a gander.
— Grace
Reflecting on our socials
Grace and Mariela reflect on the growth of the team and Future Super’s social media presence over the last 18 months — and look to how the role will change going forward.
Edit: After the first crack in the video I decided to update by explanation of Social Media Producer. The title change is mainly because Mariela is a producer! They come up with ideas, find resources and information to make the idea come true and then post it when, where and how they best see fit. Importantly they actively work to keep things moving through this process. ‘Specialist’ (Mariela’s title has been Social Media Specialist) always kind of irked me because I don’t like titles that aren’t action oriented. There we go, if you’re applying for this role, that’s why it’s called Social Media Producer.
— Mariela & Grace
Helping the rest of the business see what we mean by brand
We got some feedback that other teams don’t know how to express our brand, so they can’t act on it. That’s a barrier if we want to build a brand that lives on every touchpoint a member will experience.
We’ve spent the last year refining and honing our brand experience. There’s a strong sense of who we are and how we express ourselves inside our team, but we’ve got an internal tension: people outside of our team don’t know how our brand might express itself beyond our ads and our internal documents!
Why isn’t everyone as excited about our brand as we are?!
A few reasons come to mind:
As designers, strategists, and writers, we’ve had the benefit of sitting around and talking about the brand for hours and imagining what it could be. For people in other parts of the business, they often only have a few minutes — and that makes it harder for them to imagine what it could be. Hence, the brand = logo perception as an easy get.
Because we’ve mainly aimed brand updates to the rest of the biz about things like GDrive templates and where to find our font, that’s what they perceive that our brand is.
TL;DR the rest of the biz is thinking the letter of the brand (because that’s what we’ve talked about most with them). We’re thinking the spirit of the brand.
Spirit? Whatcha smokin’?
I can hear the eye roll from here: “What the heck do you mean by ‘spirit of the brand,’ you hippie marketer?” I hear you saying. It’s one thing to slap a logo on an ad or redesign your home page. But the experience someone has with a business is made up of many moments — from big, visible business moments (sale) to seemingly insignificant ones (pulling down your new jeans for the first time and reading the tag inside!). You can use those moments to communicate who you are and why you exist, which is pretty cool (and I personally get a lot of joy out of both as a consumer and thinking these things up). A few examples that come to mind:
- Hieatt — All about the craft of making jeans
- Rapha — All about glory through suffering (on the bike)
- Mailchimp — Making emails awesome
- Slack — Making people’s working lives more pleasant and productive
- Levis — heritage denim making a play to also be an environmentally conscious brand
As a creative team, we can seed some of these ideas — but we also need others to pick them up and run with them.
The font and the logo are just the tip of the iceberg. How do we show them that big beautiful chunk of ice that lies underneath the surface?
Thinking back to getting clients excited…and mockups!
We thought back to our agency days of making mockups of what we meant by brand to get clients excited — a pretty effective way to play without committing to actually rebuilding the whole customer experience, launching apps, etc. We don’t have to build a loading screen, we can mock it up. Play a little, share some wild ideas. It’s far easier to tone things down than to ramp them up later.
What we’ll do in the sprint
Our purpose: we want to make the vision for realising the brand strategy as real as possible. We’re calling this a ‘proof of concept’ sprint. We’ll:
- Decide which moments in the customer experience hold the most value so we can focus on showing how to bring the spirit of the brand to that touchpoint
- Mock them up
- Share them as a ‘dream vision’ of what the customer experience could be.
How will we know if we’re successful?
We’ll know we’ve succeeded if this work sparks projects or tweaks existing projects in the business to bring our brand spirit to life across the whole business.
— Amanda
Building a story, not guidelines.
A realisation that a traditional set of guidelines won’t work for how we are building the visual identity, so we’re coming up with something new.
I made a mistake. I didn’t lock us out of a social media account, that would just be foolish. Rather, I lost perspective on the role of the visual identity within our brand, and more importantly how as a team we should go about continuing to develop it.
The mistake I made was that I kept trying to finish the brand. Create rules. Document them in a set of guidelines and use them as a compass to guide the brand. A knee-jerk reaction born out of how I’ve worked in the past. I’m so used to defining a brand through a set of end points — strict rules that our output should conform to, and examples of best case scenarios for how we should turn up.
But as I’ve stated in the past, this is a team unlike any I’ve worked in before — and this is a brand that, although already exists in the wild, is still rapidly evolving. Defining a set of end points means the identity can’t evolve with the brand and instead is always playing catch up. Instead I’m starting to document the story of the visual identity in a different way. One more befitting the way we are building our brand. Through a series of starting points, conceptual ideas and examples of the mood we are trying to create, that we can riff on and build upon as our brand grows over time.
Visual elements may change but our vision won’t.
I’ll share more about how the story of our visual identity is coming together in future issues, but it bears mentioning that I didn’t come to this realisation by myself. That is testament to how we operate as a team. Being open and not too precious about the work leads to way more meaningful conversations that, at the end of the day, makes the work better and the brand stronger.
— Nick
If you’ve made it this far: thanks for joining us on this wild ride in 2021.
It’s a bittersweet issue, this one, but it’s been a joy and an honour to be part of. #ThanksForTheMemories, I can’t wait to join the throngs of Future Super fans who can’t get enough of our creative team’s work.
— Mariela
