Putting people before pixels

BaseKit brand strategy & refresh

Tech company BaseKit develops powerful software tools for partner brands such as telcos and hosting companies who then offer them to their micro business customers. Global players such as Telefonica and Fasthosts are among its partner companies. At the start of this year, 12 years after it was established, BaseKit was at an exciting juncture: With BCorp status pending, they had recently received a substantial investment. This would be used to drive future growth by developing their sales and marketing function.

Challenge

BaseKit were struggling to articulate their offering which made for some confused messaging. Wanting to ensure that the new funding had maximum impact, they were aware they needed to develop a brand strategy to clarify their positioning, guide their new team and boost their marketing communications, including that of their employer brand, to help them attract the best talent.

I approached Sue and her team because we wanted to clarify our brand strategy ready to boost our big investment in sales and marketing. We now have a standout brand and a very clear sense of our purpose and positioning.

Simon Best, Founder, BaseKit
At this important stage of their development, the BaseKit team needed to be in a position where they could confidently articulate and embed their values, while communicating the simplicity and ease with which end users could navigate their three products. They wanted to show they weren’t just ‘another’ SaaS outfit and get across how they shared many of the values of their end users.

With so many of its partners and end users headquartered outside of the UK and Europe, there was a need to steer clear of culturally-specific language as well as bear in mind the differences between the requirements of the primary (partners) and secondary (end-users) audiences that were to be addressed.

Approach

We were initially approached to work purely on strategy, develop brand architecture and run our Values in Action staff workshops. Client interviews, competitor research, a staff brand audit survey and a deep dive discovery session revealed that something more wide-reaching was needed.

It became apparent that a visual brand refresh was essential to not only complement the new brand strategy and messaging, but to also ensure a marked move away from the bland digital agency space. In this way, BaseKit would be able to stand out, taking ownership of the end-user niche they served – micro businesses.

Solution

During the brand strategy research process, what shone through was how BaseKit really cared about their end users. It was about far more than providing them with great UX, it homed in on BaseKit’s core belief – that every micro business owner should have their expectations met – having the right tools to get them online fast.

This insight informed the brand essence – BaseKit enables ‘effortless success’. It proved a strong jumping off point for our creatives to work with, contributing to a tone of voice and narrative that positioned BaseKit as a People’s Champion, an agent of change whose mission, in serving its partners, had a wider global community interest at heart. The resulting tone of voice that was created has optimism and empowerment baked in – serious but not formal, it’s intended to inspire and inform, and the Brand Guidelines detail how it can be adapted so it appeals seamlessly to BaseKit’s different audiences.

The tone of voice is complemented by brand photography that takes in a couple of different styles. There are in-situ, natural, unposed images and portrait shots intended to champion the business owner end users themselves. Reinforcing the idea that business owners can manage every aspect of their online presence from a mobile phone – the portrait photography of everyday hero business owners has them ‘looking out’ from a specially designed, graphic mobile phone frame.

The ‘effortless success’ brand essence also informed the visual language of the brand refresh. The flow arrows, signifying direction, speed and ease, are an integral element of the brand, weaving their way around content, graphics and the bold, friendly typography. The full colour palette is similarly bold and optimistic.

The growing in-house marketing team have been provided with everything they need to roll out and run with the new branding – from versatile social templates, to sales decks and sub brands.

And finally, we developed a flexible block-based website, giving the team the freedom to build visually rich and engaging pages that sell their company and products to the max.

Following the success of this project we went on to name and develop a new sister brand Kitstart, for Basekit’s partner referral program.

Latest projects

Cataloguing Mr Doodle

A journey of brand evolution

Striking a bold, new note

Driving change through directed giving

All projects