Creating a New IBM Brand

Role

Design Researcher

Tools

Mural

Timeline

May 2021 - July 2021

Team

Kareem Collie (Design Lead), Krystal Webber (Design Partner)

Creating a brand with help from a community of leaders.
‍
‍In 2021 IBM Consulting announced the launch of a new organization to support the growth and collaboration of IBM's largest consulting partner organizations, IBM Strategic Partners. This organization included a new set of leadership and the formation of various programs to support IBM consultants in leveraging resources from 11 IBM strategic partnerships to utilize during client engagements. The design team was tasked with creating an IBM Strategic Partners brand identity that would be included in promotional and client-facing material utilized by thousands of consultants.

Project Overview

Oppertunity

Gather community feedback to create a scalable brand to use across multiple communications platforms to leverage for material with strategic partners (such as AWS, Salesforce, Workday, etc) as well as IBM clients.

Can a new brand help drive excitement and interest in engagement with a new IBM organization?

Project Approach

Phase 1: Gather perspectives from global executive leadership. Design lead-crafted options for potential brand directions. Options were presented to stakeholders and a small group of IBM Strategic Partners geo leadership to gather insight into a particular brand direction. .
Phase 2: I present design targeted preference to a group of Consulting Leadership across geos to gather final feedback and refine as needed. I wanted to understand user perception of the new brand.

Project Goals

Create a cohesive but distinct IBM brand identify for Strategic Partners
The brand should appear to be unified alongside the other IBM department yet retain its own sense of identity
Convey a sense of collaboration and partnership in a unique way
The new brand needs to convey unity, teamwork, and excitement.

Phase 1 Narrow an Approach

Study Design

Once the visual design lead had created a few branding options after executive stakeholder feedback I set out a survey via a Slack message to gather feedback feedback from different geo leaders regarding a preferred brand approach. We found a preference for a specific option. This was based on the initial reactions to a specific visual approach based on gut reactions and what geo leaders thought would resonate most with the market and clients.

Highlights

We found a preference for option A amongst the geos leadership particpants.
Leadership had split opinions on option A, some felt that it was too "old and non-modern looking".
We aligned on an approach to test for the sentiment of the brand direction given the fears of leadership

Phase 2 Refine the Approach

I wanted to test if the fears of leadership were validated regarding the chosen brand option. They thought that the branding approach might seem too "dated and dull" so I designed a desirability test based on the approach outlined by the Nielson Norman Group (NNG). While the activity I designed was not exactly aligned to the NNG outline I wanted to create a fun and interactive way to have a facilitated conversation with participants while collecting feedback during each session.

Using the Microsoft Desirability Toolkit to Test Visual Appeal.

Activity Objectives

Determine geo leaders' attitudes towards the new brand
Identify if a the new brand approach should be further refined based on feedback

Activity Outcomes

A community-created description of the IBM Consulting Strategic Partners brand
Alignment to not change the brand identity based on participant feedback

Activity Overview

Introduction, Level Setting, Instructions
Review the Design
Review a list of words to describe the design
Add more words if a desired description is missing
Explain the chosen verbage

Research Activity

View Activity⤻

Insights

We gathered feedback on the overall perceptions of the visual expression which in turn helped develop the overall tone and voice to use across all marketing, external communications, internal communications, and presentation material that would be leveraged by consultants at IBM working with Strategic Partners.

Tone & Voice

The most common words used to describe the brand were: abstract, energetic, bold, partnership, and drive
The most frequently chosen words are in contrast to what external leadership had initially believed would be interpreted by geo leaders. This alleviated initial hesitations about the brand direction.

Design Considerations

‍A major point of consideration was the need to further develop partnership co-branding for joint presentations and engagement with partner companies.
The design team needed to reevaluate how to incorporate partner branding into partnership specific content (such as presentations and playbooks)

Leading with Imagery

Geo leadership responded most positively to imagery that showed people engaging in team or group activities which is in contrast to traditional IBM imagery of technology and servers.
We developed a library of images that would represent the IBM Strategic Partnership brand to leverage for presentations and marketing material

Synthesis Board

Picture LIBRARY

Outcomes

Leading with extensive design expertise from our creative lead and leveraging research gathered by myself, we were able to create a brand for the new IBM Strategic Partners organization that was driven by community input. We discovered assets to include such as additional partnership branding powerpoints and a photo library for presentations. The brand was well-received and had a successful launch company-wide.