In recent years, brands the world over have adopted more and more ways to engage with their audiences digitally – and the 2020 pandemic increased that exponentially. Of course, the great joy of digital is that there’s tons of data available, so it’s a no-brainer that measuring digital effectiveness is a must for businesses that are serious about building their brands.
But with a wealth of data availability comes challenges. Not all of it will be useful. Make informed decisions by knowing what to measure. Consider which online channels to use, how these channels sit in the overall customer journey (eg awareness, acquisition or conversion) and online objectives (eg increased sales, increased website visits, online registrations or downloads, etc).
And don’t forget how this all fits into wider business objectives, using the brand’s positioning as a cut-through to all decision-making.
create.hsbc: Driving behavioural change
Digital brand expression is often leveraged to encourage behavioural change amongst key internal audiences in times of change.
Following HSBC’s brand and design system redevelopment, a totally new, simple, unified, effective vehicle for HSBC’s internal and external creative agency community was needed – a single source of truth for the brand standards.
The new intranet, named create.hsbc, not only houses HSBC’s creative assets, guidelines and toolkits, it’s also a catalyst to break down siloed mentality, to foster creative community engagement/inspiration, collaboration, and best practice sharing.
One-year post-launch, it’s become the ‘go to’ place for over 60,000 users across HSBC’s global creative community. Plus in the three months following create.hsbc’s launch, results were nothing short of extraordinary: +71% page visits vs objective, +330% page visits YoY vs old platform, +119% unique visitors vs objective, +469% YoY unique visitors vs old platform, +115% repeat visits vs objective, and +165% repeat visits YoY vs old platform.
create.hsbc contains everything in one place that the brand’s creative community needs to do an exceptional job. It’s easy to use, seamless, shareable, and searchable – so everyone can now build the HSBC brand together.
Contraption: SEGRO Corporate Video
Contraption isn’t just any B2B Brand Film. Produced to celebrate SEGRO’s centenary (and beyond), it epitomises their brand purpose “to create the space that enables extraordinary things to happen”.
It needed to be spectacular, marking the 100-year milestone in a fun and memorable way, capturing SEGRO’s brand purpose, and demonstrating the depth and breadth of their customers. The ambition? Contraption would be so brilliant that it would become the first ever property sector viral video, with 500,000 total views.
It was a bold and ambitious move for this FTSE100 B2B property brand to emulate ad agency Wieden+Kennedy’s award-winning 2003 consumer brand advert for Honda “The Cog” with just a fraction of the time and budget.
SEGRO worked alongside Big Button and mechanical artist/sculptor Nik Ramage to plan, design, storyboard, build and film Contraption. 11 months of planning culminated in one month to build, test, and film it – all in one continuous take!
Within just 4 days, Contraption became the first viral film in the property sector, with over 500,000 views across all social channels. The numbers continued to grow and quickly surpassed 1,000,000 views thanks to social sharing.
SEGRO and Big Button set out to make something extraordinary. Despite many challenges along the way, they didn’t waver from that. They made what they said they would. And it did what they wanted it to do.
Within just 4 days, Contraption became the first viral film in the property sector
Platform redesign: Loterie Romande
Established in 1937 with the objective of working for public good, Loterie Romande is the lottery provider for the six French-speaking Swiss Cantons. The online offer had become outdated and inflexible.
Design consultancy ELSE worked with Camelot Global Services to deliver a new platform, with mobile at its core, to deliver more players, registrations and repeat usage. The start point was to explore what a lottery stands for; to evoke Loterie Romande’s social responsibility and balance this with an engaging and elegant digital design aesthetic to suit the Swiss French market.
Following the redesign, the new platform achieved a +250% increase in registrations and player volume doubled. This delivered a +25% growth in sales, whilst 75% of users found it easier to buy tickets on a mobile device.
How to build a brand’s digital impact? Like the above examples, set objectives, establish benchmarks, measure against those objectives and versus those benchmarks, and refine based on the results. Then rinse and repeat.