Intro
The reason why Honeycomb Credit exists is to build vibrant, financially-empowered communities by connecting small businesses and local investors. When I joined Honeycomb as the first marketer and third employee, I knew that it was imperative to establish a strongly purpose-driven brand to effectively communicate and connect with small businesses and community members who share the same vision for community wealth building, especially to attract and acquire early adopters. In the past 3.5 years and still ongoing, I’ve built and established Honeycomb’s brand across multiple stages: early brainstorming, creative exploration, and development into brand maturity.
Team
Branding Lead: Sophia Fang
With execution by the marketing team and workshop feedback from the whole team at Honeycomb Credit
Brainstorming
I led multiple design thinking workshops with the whole Honeycomb team in 2018. The first workshop centered on exploratory design thinking questions delving into the purpose and vision of Honeycomb and what it stands for:
Why was Honeycomb founded?
What are our core values and beliefs?
What challenges are our customers facing?
What value do we add and deliver to our customers?
What do we do better than anyone else? What makes us special?
What are words we would want our customers to describe us with?
What do you envision Honeycomb becoming?
In this fast round, each member of the team was given 2 minutes per question to write down as many answers as possible on sticky notes, with an emphasis on quantity over quality. Then, the sticky notes for each question were gathered together in different parts of the room and grouped together in like-minded clusters. We then had a group discussion on the main themes and observations that we noticed for each question.
In the second workshop, I created a printed image wall with nationally recognized brands in complementary or unrelated industries (Personal Banking, Airlines, and Two-sided Tech Markets). Each participant in the team was given a pack of green and red stickers and instructed to consider the brands based on their desirability and whether they envisioned Honeycomb to be similar or different from them. The participants were asked to place green stickers on desirable brands and red stickers on undesirable ones. After the sticker exercise, I facilitated a group discussion on why they voted the way that they did, starting with the brands that had the most red stickers, before moving on to the ones with the most green stickers and finally the mixed ones. Throughout the conversation, I wrote down key adjectives that were mentioned on the whiteboard.
After the two workshops, I consolidated and summarized the findings and created the final word clusters defining the Honeycomb brand voice. These brand voice descriptors have held strong for 4 years despite changes in messaging and outreach.
Experimentation
Throughout 2019 and 2020, I experimented with marketing messaging and visuals across different channels with the marketing team and created a public-facing media kit for Honeycomb brand usage. I also interviewed small business and investor customers to find language-market fit. It was also imperative to gently correct any misuse of the brand across the team to maintain the integrity and consistency of the brand.
In 2021, I worked with my CEO, the Director of Customer Experience, and the Director of Sales to conduct a SWOT analysis of the brand and identify the key components of the brand foundation.
Brand Book
Taking the findings of the two-year experimentation period, the SWOT analysis, and the brand foundation tool, I created the 25-page official Honeycomb Credit Brand Book that defines the mission, vision & values of Honeycomb; the brand strategy including brand voice, taglines, and customer messaging; brand elements instructing how to use the logo, colors, and typography correctly; visual elements like the strategy for imagery; and brand applications in website development or graphic design.
Impact
Brand-building is an ongoing, constantly iterative process. Since 2018, Honeycomb’s brand has helped with building awareness, trust, and validation in the company to drive $12M+ and counting in investments to 200+ small businesses across the U.S.
The full brand book is available to view upon special request.