Smarter email comms for pro services
A cut-through brand for a start-up email marketing agency
Uncovering a unique positioning and crafting a brand for an email comms company
ProNarrative is an email marketing company with a unique take on the game. They use storytelling, emotional intelligence, and more innovative email communications to help professional services brands appear more knowledgeable, authoritative, and professional. Seeking to stand out in a competitive market, ProNarrative collaborated with Ply, to uncover its visual strategy, develop a captivating brand identity, and design their website.
A deep dive workshop, decoding ProNarrative's visual strategy
To uncover ProNarrative's visual strategy, Ply fired up our insight-uncovering strategy workshop. The workshop delved into the essence of the brand, its values, and the core problems ProNarrative aimed to solve for its customers using the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework. From this online session, Ply gained a comprehensive understanding of ProNarrative's brand personality and positioning.
A collaborative approach yields a dynamic brand identity
Based on the insights from the strategy workshop, Ply identified a 'controlling idea' behind ProNarrative's approach - storytelling. This became the foundation for the brand's visual direction. Ply developed two distinct visual concepts centred around storytelling. Collaboratively, we refined the ideas together, leading to the creation of a unique and powerful visual identity. This included logo design, an energetic colour palette, progressive typography choices, and an overall brand system that captured ProNarrative's essence.
High-performance framework for ProNarrative's website revamp
With the brand identity established, Ply worked closely with the ProNarrative team to understand the specific requirements for the website. Using our high-performance framework that blends high-spec design and conversion optimisation, Ply created a design system that leveraged immersive video headers, personalised navigation and process explainers to keep users scrolling from top to bottom.
Taking the takeaways
Sometimes a new company has to contend with being dismissed as 'too early' by potential customers but in our experience, this can largely be overcome with a well-executed brand strategy and identity that helps companies like ProNarrative to appear as more established, credible and professional.
The agency game is thick with competitors and standing out is always a challenge. Founder Ben Sweetlove came to the project with a clear value prop: A company big on storytelling, emotional intelligence and an email-centric approach, for professional services firms. That's a clear market position and differentiation, which helped us immensely in being able to take the brand in the right direction from the get-go.