From Joaquin Phoenix to word games. How we found our brand.
Hi, I’m James, one of the founders of Pia. In this post I am going to explore how we ended with our name Pia and the branding journey that we have been on as a team.
What’s in a name
As with most startups, the conversation around your name is critical. It needs to embody the brand whilst describing what it is that the new company will actually do. Both Lex and I knew what we wanted to build and who we wanted our customers to be but we needed a name and a brand to go with it. Luckily for us the name came first and as with most great ideas from the Pia team it involved a few beers 😜
We were out for a few drinks after work on a Friday and the conversation soon turned to the right name for this new product. I always preferred the concept of a virtual assistant over a Chatbot as the product would do so much more than simply chat to our customers with a load of Gifs and Emojis. AI had also developed sufficiently for us to be able to build a product that could be highly personalised for each user… So that gave us personal and assistant and well investment just fell in to place for obvious reasons.
The need to find an acronym for this was absolute given my background as a Management Consultant; so Pia was the natural progression.
Personality comes first
We chose to work with a fantastic agency called Vitamin London to help us with the brand and design work. I can’t recommend them highly enough and we absolutely loved their approach to the task in hand. Given the fact that Pia, the assistant, was going to be critical to the success of Pia the brand; we needed to build a personality for it first.
We spent a lot of time speaking to virtual & voice assistants, bots and even real life customer service and financial service teams. This is where the Joaquin Phoenix reference comes in as one of the design team watched his excellent film Her in the search of inspiration. Her explores the relationship between a lonely writer and his in-ear assistant, it is definitely worth a watch.
We are living in a rapidly changing world; it is pretty normal for me to shout obscenities at Alexa if it gets the timer wrong (maybe that’s just me) or I can order a new pair of jeans via a chatbot. It is therefore vital to build a technology brand with this in mind and Pia needed a personality before we knew what it would look like.
The design team set up a game to help us find Pia’s personality. Vitamin challenged the whole team to identify the words that we felt best described the desired personality of Pia. The results that came back were pretty consistent and helped to narrow our focus. Pia needed to be supportive, honest, knowledgable and generally an arm around the shoulder of investors who would otherwise feel lost and overwhelmed. It was also important that we didn’t align Pia to a specific gender, you will be talking to an AI assistant, a computer built by humans but a computer all the same.
This early personality was initially focussed on the assistant and how it would engage our customers but it was also a fantastic guide for the brand as a whole.
Aligning the brand to the personality
So we had the mission statement, we had the name and we had Pia’s personality, it was time to start to look at the brand. We went through an initial process of refining different concepts and brand mechanisms. All of the concepts had a fixed set of guiding principles that Lex and I had set. The brand and the design had to be:
- Clean;
- Smooth; and
- Impactful.
It was such an important set of principles for our team. All too often I see design that is overly cluttered and badly structured, that kind of design is often easy for the business to build but ignores the end customer. The customer had to come first in every aspect of our design and our brand.
Aligning the brand colours with the personality came next and we must have talked to at least one hundred friends and family with the different options. We landed as a team on a blue to green gradient. This felt like a great balance of the trust and security that the blue can offer with the health that the green brought to the table. Ultimately, our brand is about empowering investors to make decisions that can help them be more financially secure in the future.
The end results
We are proud of the brand that we have ultimately developed and I certainly feel it delivers on the principles we set ourselves. It is clean and most importantly the elements that we have included within the design of the product are subtle but very impactful. I look forward to sharing more with you about the design of Pia soon and how we have used this brand in practice. Sign up at yourpia.com to help shape the future of investing.
The Pia logo (left) alongside the brand mechanism used when Pia is chatting with our customers (right)
