Brand Strategy Case Study—Persona
Persona is a creative studio based in Hong Kong. Persona reached out for guidance during the next phase of their company's evolution.
Under its previous brand, Persona began its journey as a healthcare-focused industrial design studio. Founded in 2017, the studio has two co-founders who met in Hong Kong whilst working at a well-known creative agency.
The following is an overview of our approach while working through our brand strategy workshop.
Why rebrand now?
— The existing studio name, Studio Doozy, feels outdated, young, and impersonal.
— The company’s competitive standing has improved, having graduated from a ‘startup design studio’, and the brand no longer reflects the scope and size of its clients.
— The consultancy side of the company has grown and needs to attract and retain design talents and clients in its own right. The company also runs inclusive design workshops.
— There are three companies under one brand that needs differentiating. Studio Doozy is the consultancy, Doozy is the in-house product design company, and DoCare is the curated online shop.
— Clients know Studio Doozy as one whole company and often confuse the consultancy side with their in-house products.
Approach
To facilitate the brand strategy we work through a phased approach.
Brand audit — Past, present, and future
DNA — Understanding the company behind the brand
Positioning — The competition
Vision — Looking back to look forward
Values — We are defined by our values
Personality — Communicating our character
Mission — Moving forward with purpose
Now, without further ado, let’s get into it…
1. Brand Audit
The company was founded in 2017 as an industrial design studio, focused on its own product design, innovation and manufacture.
As the studio grew, in 2019 they started taking on consultancy work for larger studios and technology startups. The studio rebranded in 2019, with an equal service split between consultancy projects and their in-house products.
Since then, the consultancy side of the studio has grown considerably in size and scope of projects, the team is currently working with large commercial brands, NGOs, and businesses in Hong Kong.
2. DNA
Using a service map tool, the company services are broken down into two overarching categories:
In-house products
Consultancy
Consultancy is then dissected into:
Social innovation
Industrial development
Software development
User research and experience
To understand the services in more depth, we ask: What three problems does Persona solve for their customers?
Persona helps their clients understand their target audience through user research, engagement testing, and feedback workshops. — they put the end-user first and foremost
This allows us to diagnose and find solutions to our client's problems — their deep understanding and empathy for their client's end users, help them create the best products possible.
We help our clients with specific expertise in industrial design, manufacture, and development. — Personas' broad and high level of expertise helps them solve their client's design, manufacturing and technical issues.
3. Positioning
We map out the competition to see where the opportunities are for service differentiation. Red represents competitors, green represents Persona.
From the chart on the left, we can see that most of the competition is quite tightly sitting in the low to mid on the quality axis. Their pricing strategies are very different and span almost the whole height of the price axis. We see an opportunity on the right side of the chart, within high-quality.
In the chart on the right, we can see the competition in a random scattering, centered on the competitor HKX. Not so surprisingly, we see opportunity on the top right of the chart, with high attention to customer satisfaction, and high market share.
From these comparison charts, we can build out an analysis of Persona’s competition.
We take this one step further by carefully analyzing how the competitor brands visualize and act online, through their website and social channels.
To complete our positioning of Persona, we can start to dissect the competitor brands' character personalities. Using a brand archetype wheel we can plot out the competitors, to find where there is space for differentiation and opportunity.
4. Vision
We use a vision road map to simplify our way forward. Considering where Persona has come from, and its goals for the future.
5. Values
Using our core value wheel, we then started to explore their brand values. In the first part of the template, we are trying to brainstorm as many values that feel natural to Persona as possible.
Using a value map to digest, critique and link Persona’s core values.
We critiqued the core value brainstorming down to 6 values. 3 core values, and 3 overlapping values. During the process, there was an underlying dialogue about finding a balance between technology, and human.
Persona’s 3 core brand values:
Insight
Empathy
Innovation
and 3 overlapping brand values:
Inclusivity
Responsibility
Accessibility
Empathy — at the core of our history, how we began from a project for a family member, which developed into our own line of projects, and now, our inclusive design consultancy.
Insight-led — our unique approach takes us from our ability to empathize with and understand our users, to the responsibility of designing products for them, and the innovation-focus at the foundation of each and every project we work on.
Innovation — our goal is to continually innovate the industry of inclusive design.
To visualize the value structure we use a value pyramid.
6. Personality
Using personality sliders we plot where we are now (lighter mark), and the personality that feels most natural for Persona’s new positioning. In parallel to the brand archetype wheel below, we discussed back and forward on the opportunity areas outlined in 3.4. Following discussions, we decided that the brand archetype that felt most natural to Persona is the Creator Archetype.
6.2 Archetype wheel from our Brand Strategy Templates
6.3 Our brand archetype from our Brand Strategy Templates
The Creator felt most natural to Persona’s brand vision because it shares most of its attributes with the brand. ‘driven by ideas’, ‘artistic and creative’, ‘passionate about the process of creation. Combined with a personal touch to add empathy to the human touch, the Creator Archetype is the perfect fit for Persona’s insight and innovation-led creative agency.
7. Mission
During the mission phase, we want to distill the core values, personality, vision, and positioning into Persona’s mission. We asked three final questions to help distill all the work into the brand mission.
Persona’s mission statement:
Persona’s mission is to create revolutionary products that transform lives through insight-led inclusive product design.
Persona exists to transform lives. The mission statement focuses on inclusive design (the what), their insight-led process (the how), and transforming the lives of their end-users (the who and why).
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