Branding

ArtistorY

Creating a new B2C Brand & designing an app

Challenge

Developing a new brand that resonates with consumers and an app user experience that aligns with and brings the brand to life

Background

To make navigating through my work more accessible, I have organized this website into four different themes – storytelling, brand, innovation, and strategy. The truth is that there are components of all of these in all of my projects.

When founding and running a start-up, these themes constantly overlap, everyday, and across every major activity. The process of creating a new brand is a case in point.  I begin with the strategic work of determining the market opportunity/gap to pursue, pinpointing the target consumer, innovating to create products that meet the market need, and communicating this story in a compelling way to consumers, investors, and partners.

When our start-up, Emerging Artist Network, shifted its focus from a B2B data analytics platform to a B2C mobile gaming platform, I kicked off a new brand development and positioning project with a deep dive into consumer needs.

Solution

To facilitate this research process, I conducted dozens of one-on-one interviews and focus groups with potential consumers using a Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework. JTBD was the brainchild of the late Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton Christensen, who stipulated that while traditional marketing focuses on market demographics or product attributes, Jobs Theory explains why customers make the choices they do. 

What do people hire music to do for them and which jobs are not currently being filled by today’s music tech? Further, how can the technology we created be leveraged to help users do these jobs?

We used these findings to hone in on the key opportunities to guide our product development process and roadmap.

Simultaneously, using a brand positioning process I had evolved from my consumer packaged goods background and brand work for the Knicks and clients at Agile Strategies Consulting, I engaged our team to create our new brand architecture and positioning. This included our new brand pillars, brand promise, target consumer, consumer insight, and key benefit/reason. 

We subsequently used this in developing the new brand name, logo, taglines, and our brand style (fonts, colors, etc.).

The brand work provided clarity on the overall user experience — all features and functionality grew out of the Jobs to Be Done work and the resulting Artistory brand architecture.  The intensive process of creating the overall app user experience began with our testing the “on brand” concepts with consumers (through focus groups and 1:1), and storyboarding each component of the app. Screen by screen, I would create briefs for our UI/UX designer that would include a rough sketch of basic functionality of each screen and the designer would develop wireframe prototypes which we would test again with consumers. With this feedback, the UI/UX incorporated the branding elements as our developers operationalized the functionality which we then put into beta testing.

Results / Epilogue

The Artistory App was introduced in the Apple Store in late December 2021 and its first major gaming platform, BrackHits, in March 2022 as Artisory prepares for a hard launch in Q2.

My time at General Mills taught me that the brand positioning process never ends even for brands that have been around for decades. You never stop talking to consumers and making adjustments to your brand architecture based on what you discover. This has been true for Artistory. At every stage, our conversations with consumers and the data we gather has been the driver of changes and optimization.

Another enduring lesson I learned was that a brand marketer can never be too close to the consumer. For Artistory and all other brand projects I undertake, I personally develop all interview and focus group protocols, lead the moderation, as well as determine the data we collect from users and develop customized reporting dashboards.