Project Description
Working with an innovative financial client from their founding in 2009, evolving and growing the brand to meet changes and challenges in the market.
Working with an innovative financial client from their founding in 2009, evolving and growing the brand to meet changes and challenges in the market.
Source were a financial asset management firm, founded in partnership with some of the world’s largest financial institutions to provide a platform for Exchange Traded Products. They became one of the fastest growing and most innovative new providers of ETFs in Europe, evolving with a rapidly changing market and challenging traditional ways of investing.
The studio were first engaged in 2009 to design, develop and launch the new brand to investors. Working together for over nine years, we have provided constant design support and creative direction as the company has grown and evolved.
In 2018 the company was acquired by Invesco, one of the world’s biggest asset managers and we began a process of transitioning the brand to the new company, working closely with stakeholders in both organisations to retain the clear messaging from the original platform as we applied a new visual identity to the collateral.
A key challenge that we have faced from the start has been to remain reactive to the daily requirements of a very busy brand. Meeting this challenge has required a continuous evolution of both our design and project management processes – taking advantage of new technologies where they are available and being innovative in our approach to producing collateral.
REACTIVE, FLEXIBLE DESIGN
Alongside the global ambitions for the brand in it’s early and present forms, the day-to-day workflow is of equal strategic importance to the client – ensuring that the teams are provided with the collateral they need to approach investors.
The templates and workflows have been developed with this in mind and we have created a range of master files and guidelines which allow us to build consistent, high quality documents in a changeable, fast-paced environment.
Where appropriate, we have built bespoke automation systems to reduce lead times in serial documents such as factsheets and commentaries and also develop templates for daily use by the sales teams in MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE DIGITAL SPACE
Alongside the traditional marketing channels, we have designed online spaces targeting specific markets and a range of digital collateral, assets and advertising developed in collaboration with the marketing and sales teams. The focus has been on education, product marketing and brand awareness – with video, photography and digital campaigns playing key roles.
The design and creation of games has been a success for the brand over the years – releasing web-apps to mark key events or holidays to their client base. We have always promoted these as strictly brand-awareness campaigns which help to create an emotional touchpoint with the brand – product marketing is saved for more direct email and ad banner spaces. The team work to storyboard the ideas, create the artwork and gameplay before finally coding the apps and hosting them with the clients.
A CLOSE WORKING RELATIONSHIP
We have been closely involved with the company from it’s inception through to it’s present form, maintaining a design desk within the client’s office to ensure we are on hand and able to react immediately to any design request. We work as a full-service agency for the marketing and business teams, able to work on any project from core brand strategy through to the daily sales collateral and digital assets.
We pride ourselves on being an approachable, friendly team and provide our best design solutions when we understand our clients, their business and their audience. Working directly with Source and Invesco over the years has given us a great understanding of the ETF market; along with some of the key areas of research in the financial space.