From napkin idea to digital avatar: Building a brand for a new and small digital transformation business

Colours influence us a lot more than we think. We learn early on that yellow is for the sun, brown is for trees, blue for water. Then you grow up and groan at the red of traffic lights, and eagerly await the brown of your daily coffee.

Why does any of this matter? You’ll see in a moment.

Earlier this year, Tellable was approached by the founder of an up-and-coming digital transformation startup. They’d come with an idea, and the expertise to execute it, but they were missing something crucial: identity. What they needed was a brand: from name to website, the whole shebang.

Understanding and naming a new tech business

Names carry weight, and first impressions tend to stick in people’s minds – so our first task was to truly understand our new client. By learning who they were, we could then craft a brand that would give their prospective customers both clarity and confidence in their services.

The client’s goal was to support businesses through digital transformation, by extracting insights that would lead to taking action for the better. The aim wasn’t to just transform data, but to guide their clients from the red zones of customer dissatisfaction, operational bloating and slackened growth to the green zones of happy customers, lean ops and data-driven growth.

Here’s where colours come back into this story: If they could take poor KPIs indicated as red dots on their dashboards to  growth signals seen as green dots, it would be “mission accomplished!” – so why not use this philosophy as the foundation of the company?

Thus the name GreenDot was born.

Visual design for digital transformation

Now that the identity was established, next on our list was a way to visually depict GreenDot – a logo that captures the brand’s essence. After all, a logo is worth a thousand words (or something like that!).

An actual green dot may not have given us the clarity we needed. So what if we took inspiration from the journey of red to green, showing customers what they could expect if they utilised GreenDot’s services? Like a toggle button that would take you from :( to :) with just one click?

That was it! With the logo informing the brand guide, GreenDot now had clear visual identification. What next?

The founder of GreenDot, Shyam Prabhal, had been in the industry for decades, but it was time to build his brand as a founder – one that would carry the weight of GreenDot till the company took off. In the spirit of a fresh start, we brought the studio to him!

Over a few hours in front of the camera, the founder’s warm smile and enthusiasm for a digitally transformed future was successfully captured. He could then use these shots across social profiles, and on his newly minted business card. With the business card came a letterhead, and brand stationery – but our creative work was far from over.

Complete brand birth

The GreenDot website was in the works! Having understood GreenDot inside out, we began crafting content that would inform, inspire and instil confidence in prospective customers. Going hand-in-hand was a sleek design that reflected GreenDot’s signature colours, including a neat logo animation as a cherry on top. The final step was development – and for this we chose Wix, a cost-effective and uncomplicated builder perfect for new companies. A dash of this, and a pinch of that, and the GreenDot website was up and running! (A website that Tellable still manages, making sure it’s updated and growing with GreenDot.)

Just like that, an idea of transformation had in turn transformed, from concept to tangible.

Our client’s dream was now a living, breathing brand.

At Tellable, we believe in understanding first, communicating second. We help you find the words, and take your story from red to green – or whatever colour suits you best! Ready for a transformation?

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