Thanx Brand Refresh
Thanx provides customer engagement software for multi-unit, brick-and-mortar retailers. Thanx started by focusing on small businesses and consumers. But in 2020, our go-to-market had shifted significantly to focus on the enterprise, and a bigger focus on the restaurant industry. We needed to realign the brand to better resonate with our new Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
I led our brand refresh process in partnership with our VP of Marketing. Together, and for the first time in the company’s history, we defined and documented the why behind the brand (mission, values, guardrails, etc.) to then inform an updated identity. I was personally responsible for all design work, spearheading brand surveys (both internal and external), brand exploration – typography updates, creative direction, photography, etc., as well as rolling out on the new Thanx.com, where I did design and solicited then managed the development team.
Lessons Learned
It’s funny how often you have to be reminded of certain things. Despite our best team efforts, this project was a great reminder of the age old creative trade offs: speed vs. quality vs. cost. We optimized for speed & cost, and in the long run, suffered quality issues on our new website. When all was said and done, it was a humbling reminder that sometimes it’s important to fight for a bigger budget or more time because otherwise it might cost you more in the long run.
Success
Since publicly unveiling the brand refresh via thanx.com in February 2021, and internally shortly before that, we did win 2 of our largest deals to date. Admittedly, wins like this are multi-factor, so I can’t claim that any one factor – like the new website – was 100% responsible for those wins. But safe to say it all has an effect overtime, and the brand is now more polished and consistent than ever before. This in turn makes the brand easier to work with for internal teams, like marketing, to reinforce the brand over time.
Deliverables
- Art Direction
- Branding
- Strategy
- Illustration
Team
- Thanx Marketing & Leadership Teams
- Howard Development & Consulting [Dev]
- Ash Durham [Dev]
- Kelly Balch [Photography]
What was our WHY?
A key part, if not THE fundamental part, of the brand was the Brand Story – the why behind the brand, the driving, motivating, emotional component. While there were versions of this floating around amongst the original founders, there was no single source of truth.
When I pitched the idea of a brand refresh, I knew we’d absolutely have to start with defining and documenting they Brand Story. For our purposes, this included:
- Our mission
- Our values
- Our narrative
- Our competitive positioning
- Who we serve
- Our guardrails
I know that every brand team has a slightly different way to group and frame all of these, but this was our process. I conducted internal interviews, and provided questions for our commercial team members to interview key external folks, all about the brand. We then paired that with research, and our own expertise, to define all of these aspects. This was led by myself, in partnership with my VP of Marketing.
Start at the beginning
My personal philosophy with a solid brand is to treat it like sculpture, a subtractive process. When I inherited the Thanx brand, there was a lot working for it – and a lot that wasn’t. My goal was to zoom in, starting with our logo at the core, and dial the brand down to its essentials. Looking to the logo, we pulled out key information: subtle curves, an 8º slant, sharp corners, a degree of weight balanced with lightness from the stars, all came together to inform the refresh.
The logo itself remained unchanged, designed by the previous Thanx brand designer, Mark Bult.
Color Update
The color palette was one of my biggest areas of focus in the refresh. The leadership team made it clear that the primary brand color, Spearmint, needed to stay the same. And arguably, the secondary color palette – made of fairly unique jewel tones – worked well with Spearmint.
It was when the palette extended all the way out that odd conflicts began to pop up. Originally, the former team did a lot of colorful illustration. That was no longer our use case, so I greatly simplified the palette and removed hues that were too similar, or too at odds.
Here you can see the old palette on the left, and the refined palette on the right. We removed some colors entirely, and then improved contrast of most of the existing colors.
Photography
One of our big pain points with the old brand was the prominent use of an outdated illustration style. It gave the brand a consumer sort of appeal, not enterprise. We shifted our imagery from mostly illustration to hero photography – focusing on what we call the “Pathfinder”, the digital innovator at our customer brands who sees a vision for their business through Thanx.
Within our company, we also wanted unique treatments for employee headshots to differentiate our team at a glance in social media, marketing, PR and events. And with a growing company, you have the challenge of employee turnover. That means we didn’t want a costly headshot solution. I landed on using pre-existing headshots of employees, then photoshopping after the fact for consistency, as shown below:
We worked with L.A. photographer, Kelly Balch, to procure owned photographs of our key customers. These are used in marketing, sales and case studies.
Icons & Illustrations
Our icons and new illustrations again draw inspiration from the logo itself: a sense of boldness, a pop of spearmint, approachable but not overly cartoony as was the case with the previous assets.
Thanx.com update
The first major public showing of the brand refresh was our website, thanx.com. A full case study is in the works. Meanwhile, please visit thanx.com to see the site and all of the elements of the refresh in the wild.
