Defining a Global Brand | Square
During my 4.5 years at Square, the brand went through a period of rapid global growth. As the brand extended into more international markets with more product offerings, the creative work became more fragmented leading to a confusing brand experience for customers and a lot of duplicative work for in-house teams. Over the course of four years, I played a key leadership role in evolving the brand narrative, solidifying the brand strategy, and co-led a two-year design refresh that produced thousands of new assets. The results were immediate. We had a more cohesive brand with clear guidelines that enabled our teams to work faster and smarter.
Role: Creative Strategy, Brand Narrative, Creative Direction, Writing
GCD: Sean Conroy, Eileen Tjan
Design Director: Aaron Poe
Copywriters: Justin Whaley, Jonathan Skale
Design: Nate Godding, Ashley Corcoran
Strategy: Allison Greason, Dushane Ramsay
The Brand Narrative
When I started in 2018, the brand positioning work was just beginning. Over the course of the next 2.5 years, I helped craft the language and themes around the brand. Once we locked the brand positioning in 2020, I defined and led the development of the first comprehensive Voice and Tone Guidelines ensuring over 100 stakeholders were brought into the process. The guidelines were built to flex across multiple countries and cultures while being easy to understand.
The Design System
In early 2020, the Global Brand Team embarked on creating a cohesive marketing design system. In partnership with the product design team, we spent two years refining and building a system that could achieve the needs of a multinational corporation. The work started with surveys, robust workshops with key decision makers, and deep strategy around the insights we found through our pre-build efforts. To make the transition to the new system easier, we made the build and rollout processes highly transparent. I also led the education initiative ensuring that everyone knew what was coming and had the resources they needed to find answers (e.g. lunch and learns, training sessions, feedback sessions, consultations, and office hours).
Brand tests
Our budget for A/B testing was slim so we came up with novel ways to gain insights on how audiences reacted to the new brand design in low-stakes tests. These tests included assets for Culture Con, social + OOH campaigns, and the first brand-focused webpage on square.com.
Why Square webpage
This page is a culmination of the brand strategy, narrative strategy, content architecture, and design system work. I worked with our web strategy team to refine the brief so we could more effectively tell customers what makes Square different from our competition.
Copywriter: Melissa Rando
Design: Kirsten Martin
Culture Con
We used our storytelling opportunity at the conference to test assets pre-rollout. These included companion typography, color palette, and a subtle shift in brand tone.
