Brand DesignCase Study

ClientRef Sports Uganda

Introduction

Role

Challenge

I met the client through an Instagram post, announcing his new coffee shop; first of a kind to serve cold-pressed juice in East Africa. Later I received a DM from one of the founders interested in a meeting, we met — in our meeting, he expressed interest in refreshing the newly opened coffee shop, and pointed out how he didn’t like the logo, shared a business overview, how they plan to run an interconnected model;a sports brand offering sports wear and a healthy food niched coffee shop.

It’s been a year and 4 months, working on this project as a brand designer, product designer, art director, and project manager. Hands-on; research, strategy, UI/UX design, prototyping, usability testing, and whatnot. Allow me to share with you my process.

REF. is the first-ever sports and healthy brand, designing and producing its products locally, for the African market. The client wanted to design a brand experience and multi-sided eCommerce platform to communicate local ownership, boldness, with a premium touch as opposed to an expensive, overly priced product. On a limited budget of courses!

Solution

Research

I will break down my solution approach into, the process; Research, brand strategy, brand architecture, verbal identity, visual identity, Touchpoints, and Implementation

I carried out qualitative research, focused on learning and understanding the business, as a way of ensuring the solutions are connected to business objectives and strategies. I encouraged top-level decision-makers to answer my brand design questionnaire.

I used typform.com, because of its engaging question and answer experience. Later I input this data, in a category I like to call the Business Audit. It’s this data that assisted me to design a brand strategy.

I sent a proposal to the client, illustrating the process, project timeline, and budget.

Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy

Using a classic tool called the Decision Discovery Diagram, I then com-pare the business strategy with the brand strategy as illustrated above.

At the bottom is the audience, on the far right side is the brand strategy, and the business strategy on the left side. This ensures all solutions are parallel to each other with a common objective to serve the audience. Brand Strategy break down:

Audience Profile

I based the audience profile on an assumption of four factors; Age, Loca-tion, Income, and Status. Defining a sample audience; a group of low-in-come class between the ages of 18-30 years, living in Kampala with aspirations of a simple, active lifestyle. It’s this sample audience profile that I used to define the audience’s insight.

Audience Insight

This speculative approach helped me comprehend; what the audience says, imagine, hear, see, pain, and gain. That’s how I interpreted their: that I used to define the audience’s insight.

I want to look trendy, and live a lifestyle on a budget.

Brand Audit Competitive Analysis

From the questionnaire, I focused on what the client listed as competition; Fast Fashion Retailers, Adidas, Nike, and Jumia(Africa’s Amazon).

Based on the audience insight, the target audience needed an affordable quality product. Comparing these criteria; Affordable Prices and Quality. I used the prioritization matrix diagram to identify competitive positioning as illustrated below;

This discovery informed the Brand

Positioning, as a sweet spot between quality

low priced products and services.

The next step was to build a brand personality, which happened to pull data from the business audit. The client was clear on how to appeal to the local market, reminding them of the benefits of living a raw active lifestyle and consuming organic products. Encourage homemade products, designed through collaboration with local designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers.

The client was clear on how to appeal to the local market, reminding them of the benefits of living a raw active lifestyle and consuming organic products. Encourage homemade products, designed through collaboration with local designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers. It’s this information to form a Brand Personality.

Brand Architecture

The value proposition in mind, the next step was to work on the brand architecture; hierarchy and structure. I had a sit down with the client, we listed all the current offering, future offering, and operation structure.

With a clear way forward on strategy, the next step was to work on the verbal and visual identity, and the product and service experience

Value Proposition

After agreeing with the client on Brand Positioning and Personality, we moved on to clarifying the Value Proposition, which will later be used as a medium to design compelling visual/verbal experiences that not only communicate value to the audience but also meets their unique needs. I used the sweet spot diagram to map the competition relatively.

Verbal Identity

When designing the verbal identity, I used the value proposition and brand personality — voice and tone, to develop a narrative relative to the brand values and audience. After weeks of back and forth, reviewing the brand strategy, the client agreed on defining the brand voice as Bold, Ac-tive, and Collaborative. REF’s general tone was defined as local, authen-tic, craftsmanship, and raw.

I put together a narrative structure, based on 3 basic categories as illus-trated below. This will later be used as a style guide for copywriters and art directors, to practically come up with sweet comms and copy.

VisualIdentity

This is the most interesting part of this entire process. I kick off with a visual competitive analysis; seeking direction and inspiration per se. Us-ing a list of competitors the client shared in the questionnaire, I created mood boards of brand identities and visual art direction.

At this point, I started sketching ideas that crossed me, this process took around 3 to 5 days, thumbnail sketches, and iteration. In one of the meetings with the client, he mentioned how he likes italicized logos, as a symbol of motion. So I tried experimenting with italicized letterforms.

SubBranding

Considering the brand architecture, REF was broken down into 3 sub-brands categories; REF. CAFE, REF. SPORTS and REF GARDEN. The idea was to use the characters from the word REF in all sub-brand names.

TouchPoints

I begin this process by educating the client, what are touchpoints. Every business has unique touchpoints, together with the client, we developed a list of the most important spots where the brand interacts with the audience.

Photography I put together a creative team to produce marketing content; a freelance photographer, motion designer, and videographer. The task was to produce imagery for social media and produce product angles of about 85 products for ecommerce, this equated to about 340 product shot. It was, of course: too tight to achieve within 28 days as per client request.

I put together a creative team to produce marketing content; a freelance photographer, motion designer, and videographer. The task was to produce imagery for social media and produce product angles of about 85 products for ecommerce, this equated to about 340 product shot. It was, of course: too tight to achieve within 28 days as per client request.

Video We created shot product videos with a bit of motion graphics for both social media and ecommerce. I convinced the client to introduce the new glass bottle juice product with a creative short video. He did accept, though — offered a tight budget, I wrote the script and my team suggested to cast me since we had hired gear for only one day. Here is a link to the short video.

Link to video: https://youtu.be/UxOAo3UBREw

Link to video: https://youtu.be/mVFhXhzv9_0

The brand strategy streamlined product positioning establishing mutual partnerships with fashion designers, local gyms, and local manufacturers. Café tapped into the vegan, healthy cognizant, and traveling audience. Gaining a five-star excellent travelerrating on TripAdvisor.

The cold pressed juice product labels helped the product stand out.Café sales went up by 400%, from selling 10 to 50 juice bottles per day.

Putting this case study together has been a total recall, of all mistakes I made as lead on this project. Discovering how to improve as an individual and ideas on how we could grow the brand from thispoint(A) on.

Allow me to extend my gratitude to Chris - Photographer (Shooting and Retouching all the visuals), David - Motion Design (Animating and doing the runs), Fahad - designer (polishing product shots to the tiniest detail), Sawan and Mira - founders - aka client (the collaborative effort and companionship ), and all staff at REF (For taking care of us)

KeyTakeaway