Thanx Emerge Stronger Playbooks

Thanx is a SaaS company dedicated to helping brick-and-mortar retailers move into the era of digitization. A majority of our customers at Thanx were heavily affected by COVID-19. And while the retail & restaurant industries were aware that they may one day need to digitize, the impact of COVID-19 brought this need front and center. So we created the Emerge Stronger Playbook, a comprehensive & practical guide for brick-and-mortar retailers on how to come back stronger than ever. I partnered with our VP of Marketing, CEO and other Thanx leaders to bring the robust playbook to life through art direction, graphic design and illustration.

Success

Since its release, the Emerge Stronger Playbook has been one of the most downloaded pieces of gated content for Thanx, generating almost constant MQLs. The piece was also our first public test of some brand refresh elements we’d been exploring, including our new illustration direction.

Deliverables

Art Direction
Branding
Illustration

Meaningful, worthwhile content

Personally, I’ve had many years experience amongst marketers, and I’ve learned a lot about what works and what does not. I’m happy to say, that while tedious, this piece of content was one of the most fulfilling because it is researched, in-depth QUALITY content and not just 50+ pages of fluff (yes, it is over 50 pages – for BOTH the Restaurant and Retail editions). There was a lot of back and forth to figure out how we properly convey so much content, without either overwhelming the reader, or making things so condensed that it was too daunting.

Thanx Emerge Stronger Playbook cover mockup

A new illustration style for the brand

Illustration can be an extremely useful asset for many brands, when used correctly and when implemented appropriately in line with realistic constraints like your budget or in-house staff. In our case, I pushed for a change to our illustrations, and used the Playbook as the 1st major project on which to implement our new illustration direction. The Playbooks are made of up of individual “plays”, and so each Play has a unique cover (and color) to help keep things organized.

Thanx Emerge Stronger Playbook various sections mockup

Thanx Emerge Stronger Playbook illustrations detail

Illustrations by Brennan Gilbert

Iteration is essential, even (or especially) on a small team

During the time of this project, I was a design team of one partnering directly with the marketing & executive teams to execute as quickly as possible. In this role, it was key for me to collaborate with my team, and iterate together. Here are some very early stage concepts for art direction:

Interior

Web experiences

We created a landing page for each edition of the Playbook: Restaurant and Retail, so that we could gate the piece and generate MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads). This has been one of our highest converting pieces of content to date.

Thanx Emerge Stronger Playbook landing page design

After not seeing a high enough MQL rate, we decided to create a splash page that all new visitors would see (based on cookies) when they first land on Thanx.com. Nothing fancy, but it enabled us to promote the Playbooks front and center on the homepage while we iterated on a much more intense full website overhaul behind the scenes. As with all website experiences at Thanx, I provided design, then managed our front-end developer to get the page built.