Becoming Kilta: The Rebranding Process

Intro

Some time ago we got to a point with our team where we felt the urge to rebrand ourselves. We started as a geeky design and prototyping studio, following the traditional steps of an agency-like business, with the most ridiculous name Status Quack. (Yeah, do not say anything.) Feeling that the agency business as we knew it was kinda falling apart and not really working for us. We needed to change, grow up and reflect on who we become and how we want to move forward.

It has been more than a year since we decided to rebrand into Kilta. It might seem like a long time, honestly, it was, but the development during that one year was crucial. And we must say we are happy we didnť rush it, with enough time to discuss matters and make the right decisions.

We hope that by sharing our journey on the rebranding process we will help you to go through rebranding more smoothly (it will never be smooth, true that). What we wanted to share with you is how to get aligned on your company mission and vision, agree on your values and state your culture. So that at the end of this process you have a comprehensive brief for a visual designer and copywriters to finalize the image of your company.

Research first. That should be everyone’s mantra.

After more than 5 years in the agency business, we felt like we needed to explore new options of doing our craft and finding projects, clients, and business to work with. Our main assumption was based around our internal experience which Jan mentioned at one of our calls:

“As a freelancer with niche expertise it’s very difficult to focus on my craft and be well-compensated unless I work worldwide, which might be for someone (like myself) based in the CEE quite challenging, especially with new emerging technology like voice design.” — Jan

So we surrounded our hypothesis on the idea of connecting niche expertise not through the agency model, but rather through a freelancing platform. To be honest the whole conversation among us was sparked also by Jule’s State of the Digital Nation.

Being designers and marketers by heart we couldn’t have started otherwise, the research above all. There is no rocket science behind this phase, research is something any company can do, and honestly, any person can do. It is just basic curiosity.

We did the following…

1. We launched a questionnaire to find out more about our hypothesis.
   What and how much do companies outsource expertise in agencies vs. freelancers? How do they work with them? What are the pros and cons of those corporations? Here is the questionnaire.
   Within 3–5 days, we received about 52 answers from colleagues and acquaintances in the business.
2. We read a lot on the internet.
   Articles on the future of work, remote work, freelancing in the 21st century, alternative and decentralized business models, modern-day guilts, or tech guilds if you may.
3. We did old fashioned research of competitors.
   To analyze your future or actual competitors you may want to work with the Five Porter Forces chart or make a SWOT analysis for each competitor. Then use the Blue Ocean approach to come up with the differentiators for your company. You can also try the Strategy Design sprint by Alen Faljic, which is a nice summary of activities that might be helpful for you at this point.

In the research, we focused on validating the hypotheses, which helped us to continue the discussion and take it to the solution phase (note: a great book why it makes sense to distinguish these areas: The Playbook). So, at this stage, we knew there is a problem worth tackling. At the same time, we knew we needed to rebrand our agency, not only to move on from Status Quack but also to reflect problems on the market.

Brand Sprint Exercise

To kick off the rebranding we used the Three Hour Brand Sprint from Jake Knapp, which is not as famous as his Sprint book but serves the same purpose, a set of steps that walks you through this exercise. The 6 tasks each team member has to work on are easy — you donť need to be a brand expert. But you have to find a common ground as a team.

What we recommend to do during the brand sprint:

• Try to bring in a moderator, who isn’t biased and has a neutral point of view, which can help you through discussions.
• Take notes, track time, and focus on the decisions you have made through the exercises.
• It might have happened you left some issues from the sprint unsolved. Note them, get back to them and find a consensus. Cause they may hit you in the upcoming process and you might feel like being in an endless loop. Ex.: We had an ongoing conversation about whether we are a network or a community.

And after the brand sprint:

• Formulate your “why, how, and what” (the golden circles) into full sentences. They don’t have to be copy-perfect, just be clear and comprehensible.
• Explain your values and give examples. “Openness” is a great thing but everyone can perceive it differently.
• Agree on core target audiences and articulate value propositions.

A task that can help you with creative writing, like taglines and bios:

• We picked words (mainly adjectives and verbs) that would describe us and our work. All 4 founders worked on these tasks.
• Each of us had to write in their own words “Who we are” and “What we do”. So usually we all had our paragraphs and discussed what was important.
• Note: We have spent perhaps a little too much time on writing value propositions and bios. Important is to have some basic notes on that so that a prompt copywriter can collaborate on it further. Also, when launching your brand you may find out that you will test so many taglines and also change them in time.
• Lastly, work on visual mood boards that will set your expectations of the future visual identity.

How We Became Kilta

After the brand sprint, there was a challenging step that everyone knows. What about the name?

Our main criteria were:

1. Match the brand name with an available domain. Here is a tool that might help.
2. Easy to pronounce and the name shouldn’t have bad connotations in any language.
3. It would represent or have some connection to the idea of a platform-like community of experts.

These were basic criteria, even though finding a domain becomes more challenging. We recommend defining 3–5 of your own and scale them from 1 to 5 to prioritize. Make sure at least three are met if you want to tackle all 5 you’d need to get more creative.

If you do not have the budget for a creative agency. Make sure you have a sales rep to bounce the ideas with and nail the value proposition. Some tools can help you with the creative part such as Namelix to burst your naming ideas.

To come up with the name, to an exercise where you try to go as divergent as possible, we generated 40 possible names and then tried to link up with few best candidates, which you can achieve as follows:

• Try to come up with as many names as possible, then each of the team members can present their 3–5 most favorite ones.
• You should have a discussion and prioritize. You can achieve it by voting for the most promising ideas and reasoning the votes. If you want to move faster, the decision-maker can have the final call or more votes. Also, the method of one negative vote versus three positives per team member seemed pretty effective.
• Remember, you don’t need to decide on the spot, sometimes it’s good to take a break, sleep on it and get back to the names with a fresh mind.
• Most probably you will need 3–4 iterations.

At the end of the day, there should be consensus not only about the name, but have a common ground from where you can kick off a lot of awareness activities in the future.

So where did Kilta come from?

Kilta means “guild” in Finnish and Martin has a strong connection to Finland. So whenever he should pick a name he simply starts putting keywords of the idea and looks for Finnish translations. So yeah, the ideas sometimes come out of the blue, but we liked it because:

• It is short and easy to pronounce.
• We managed to get a .com domain for a reasonable price.
• The name holds the idea of guilt that we want to bring to life in the 21st century. (Yeah, some of the geekiness never goes away.)

Pulling Together a Brief

At this point, we knew where we stood, who to serve, and what we wanted to achieve. All of that led to creating the brief for brand designers to give our ideas a tangible visual package. Here is the brief for designers.

Finding a Brand Designer

We have published our brief and shared it among our network. We ran over 20 interviews with designers and we promised to highlight what could be improved from our point of view.

“If one advice for anyone who sells their services, try to wear your client's shoes so that you can structure your sales pitch well.” — Martin

A quick summary of improving one's pitch:

• Start with the brief, read it carefully, and connect dots in the client’s context (e.g. don’t ask questions if answers are in the brief).
• Narrow your sales pitch by telling where you feel strong and how it matches the client’s expectations. (E.g. meaning you should build a signature of yourself that is better for some projects than the others, keep that in mind.)
• Show similar projects (e.g. we were particularly interested in difficult projects and what were obstacles designers had to overcome as we were expecting some challenges on the way as well).
• Walk the extra mile (e.g. share articles that can help to understand your craft a bit more, clients are curious human beings).
• Be ready for the question: “If you would be in our shoes, what would you pay attention to when selecting the right designer?” This appeared to be a great question to single out more senior designers.

In the end, it comes down to how you feel about the work as everyone has a specific style and it needs to match how you envision your brand. You’re entering a relationship so you want to partner up with a person you feel a mutual understanding and where you see that compromises will be done easily.

What Brand Outcomes You Want to Have When Launching

So the needs may differ based on the industry your company is launching its brand. However, for us and many more, these would be the basics.

Visual components you need for the start:

• Logo & Logotype
• Fonts hierarchy
• Colour palette
• Basic shapes
• Rules how to use all mentioned above

Tip.: Convert your brand guideline and assets to a Figma worksheet. You may easily access all colours, fonts and shapes to create profile pictures, headers and other creative assets.

For us, it was important to come up also with principles, values and pre-launch our idea:

• In a Manifesto aka Code of Conduct.
• Design a fair distribution of the company as it is inherently important regarding our values.
• Design processes and operations wiki so that anyone who hop-on to Kilta will have not only moral guidelines but also guidelines to work effectively.
• Far more, we pre-launched the web to collect initial feedback and have a new “business card” to show to the world.

A Few Takeaways

• The branding process takes time. You will need to have a clear idea about your direction, that needs some thoughts and time to settle in.
• Invite an external moderator who doesn’t have the biases to help you with activities such as brand sprint, help you formulate your ideas, or feedback brand names.
• Have sales and/or marketing people on board. It is vital to have a person who is in touch with the outer world.
• This whole branding sprint, in the beginning, should help you to set a compass for activities and decisions that come later → to make sure it’s well-understood by the team and it’s easy to communicate.
• If you are starting the venture and branding is not part of your value proposition (in our case it was) spend your resources elsewhere