Champions of _______
The Zendesk Creative team’s journey to writing & designing the “Champions of customer service” campaign
(*note: the second half of this article was written by Brand Designer at Zendesk, Kimberly Mar. We couldn’t publish under two names, but this was a team effort—because team work makes the dream work.)
Zendesk has a new slogan. Heck, you may have already seen it popping up around the internet.
As the brand team knows, with a new slogan comes a new campaign and new ways to get our message out there.
If you’re curious about what the slogan means, check out this blog post before diving in here. If you’re more interested in the campaign we came up with to put it out there, well just keep on readin’ buddy.
The goals of this campaign were simple:
- Put the slogan everywhere (straight from our CEOs mouth)
- Raise brand awareness in a cohesive and clear way that looks, feels, and sounds like Zendesk
Starting out, this project was tough because there weren’t many boundaries. We had a TON of ideas that included everything from photoshopping headsets onto mice to a talking miniature donkey. (Why were we dancing around an animal theme here? It’s a question only for our past creative minds.) Eventually, we dialed our wild ideas down to the one that stood out for the right reason: it was simple, easy to digest, clear, and had many opportunities to build on.
The first step of this was figuring out the copy. We had a slogan that had to be prominent, but we also needed a way to get the message to stand out. If there’s too much going on within a concept for a campaign, sometimes the original idea gets a little lost in the sauce (in this case, the slogan itself). With this in mind, it was crucial to make sure the slogan was the star of the show. Which led us to this:
Using the slogan as a jumping off point for other ways that Zendesk stands for good customer service was the answer. Creating a template that included the slogan meant that we could interchange just about anything into our own blank. This gave us endless options to achieve our main goal:
Remind people that Zendesk exists to champion better versions of customer interactions — no matter where they occur.
After coming up with pages of what could fill our “Champions of ___________”, we started thinking visually. How could we make sure that this still felt like Zendesk, while also standing out just a smidge more than our high level company messaging? Luckily, we had a team of designers on the case…I’ll hand over the writing to Kim, one of our brand designers, to fill you in on all of the deets.
Creating the System
With a clear concept, slogan, and a lot of great copy to play with, our next phase was figuring out what this thing was going to actually look like.
One of the first steps was creating a color palette that our team could utilize for the campaign. Since this campaign relied heavily on messaging we wanted a wide variety of colors that we would be able to mix and match with one another. Using our brand palette we chose high contrast colors and mixed them with low intensity brights for an eye catching look and feel.
Lockup & Type Treatment
After the color palette was defined we worked on laying out the main slogan lockup for “Champions of customer service”. We decided on a left aligned type treatment since it played nicely with the accompanying copy choices and allowed room for longer or shorter copy.
In addition to the lockup, we also worked on how the copy would look with different color combos for the type and the background (shown in the copy section). This was built to better organize how the pieces would work as stand alone messaging and also as a unified piece.
Pattern and partitions
To create the feeling of ‘everywhere-ness’ and emphasize the many facets of Champions, we implemented a checkered grid system to hold the messaging. In many large scale applications the use of multiple headlines and colours helped support the overall message and create a recognizable visual continuity.
The slogo
The slogo is what we call the lockup of our Zendesk logo + our Champions Campaign Slogan, “Champions of customer service”. Its main function is to tie the messaging campaign back to Zendesk and remind our customers that while we are Champions of customer service, we are also still Zendesk.
After several iterations, we landed on the arched type treatment as it would effectively scale and works well as a visual signature to the campaign. (Also, it’s fun to animate!)
Advertising & OOH
Now that the campaign system was finalized, we were able to use it to quickly turnaround deliverables like digital and printed ads.
Finishing this project was no small feat. Putting together a campaign of this scale required a lot of cross collaboration between our Design, Copy, Production, and Video teams — luckily we really like each other.
For more info about the campaign and slogan, head on over to https://www.zendesk.com/lp/champions-of-customer-service/. Be sure to check out the video below, and keep your eyes peeled for more of our creations out in the wild.
Thanks for taking a scroll with us. Check out design.zendesk.com for more thought leadership, design process, and other creative musings
