Brand Identity
Benchmark Email
SaaS
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B2B Digital Marketing App
Created new brand identity and logo to reflect SaaS company's evolution from startup to established brand.
Rebrand Background
Benchmark was founded in 2003 as a small startup aiming to give SMBs an easy and effective email marketing product to connect with customers. Its past brand identity had been slowly pieced together as needs came up.
As the company grew and expanded to other languages, Benchmark’s identity needed to continue evolving to push it to the next level, building its brand value and global brand recognition.
The new brand identity embodied the company’s values and friendly personality while reflecting its professionalism and years of experience that organizations had come to trust.
Old logomark
My Role
As a senior designer, I collaborated with the Director of Design and a fellow founding designer on the SaaS company's new logo and brand identity foundation. I worked closely with stakeholders throughout the process, from turning core values into visual principles to rolling out the rebrand across all product and marketing in US and international regions.
Partnering across departments on the first phase’s launch in March 2017, I created internal documentation as we transferred full brand ownership to the marketing team. They continued to expand the company's visual rebrand while the design director and I rebranded the app during the product redesign.
Old logo vs new logo
Assessment
Assessing the company’s touchpoints, branding challenges, and practical needs, the designers and I defined a brand brief, strategy, and scope to keep us aligned throughout the process while providing a common language to communicate with stakeholders.
We balanced time and resources by narrowing our scope to foundational elements since each of us had ongoing product work.
Concept Explorations
An initial area the designers and I focused on was building brand expression through a new logo and logomark. One that was distinctive, showcased the company’s personality, and let customers know they could trust us.
Drove Alignment With Brand Attributes
Based on word association and visual pairing exercises, we quickly drafted rough ideas through brainstorming and sketching sessions. From these, we determined brand attributes that continued to drive logo concepts, colors, visual elements, and tone of voice throughout the process.
Brainstorm sessions
Explored Logo And Logomark Directions
We pushed concepts with hand sketches and digital versions to flush out different ideas and directions.
Team logo concepts
Refined Concept
Iterating and aligning with each other and stakeholders through continuous feedback, we narrowed to a single direction that visually captured the company’s brand attributes - confident, friendly, professional, and progressive growth - and expressed them in a way that reflected the company’s years of experience building trust with a global audience.
Refinement process
Final Logo and Logomark
The new logo represented the next chapter for Benchmark while reflecting its legacy of seeing SMBs grow through effortless digital marketing.
Implementation and usage guidelines
Extending Foundational Brand Expression
We expanded the company’s brand identity through colors, typography, visuals, tone of voice, and other elements. We said goodbye to the past identity’s “Benchmark blue” but paid homage to it with a fresher take as one of the primary colors.
Rolled Out Marketing Touchpoints
In partnership with the marketing team, we prioritized high impact touchpoints to update in phase one, testing customer response and performance of different visual styles, images, and illustrations.
I also coordinated changes for other company communication and marketing channels including emails, social channels, admin portals, and other outbound messages.
Rebranded The Product Separately
Because of our roadmap strategy, we minimized major in-app changes until the following year when I worked with the design director on a full product redesign, creating a responsive web app with modern UI/UX principles, including a scalable design system that integrated the new branding.
Old app vs redesigned app