The Ask
As Senior Manager of Creative at ZoomInfo, I was tasked with leading the creative team through a refresh of our primary brand. Our approach was to audit and evolve our identity, including our primary brand assets, design guidelines, and tone across all marketing channels, web, product, and content. We would launch an field guide for consistency and self-serve usage across internal teams and external partners.
Our goal would be to develop a primary brand identity that's more consistent and sophisticated, and collapse in sub-brands statically. We would re-audit marketing collateral after a year for 90% consistency across all channels, increase month-over-month usage of templates by employees, and ultimately seek to increase brand recall and mental availability.
The Problem
ZoomInfo's visual brand expression failed to keep up with the evolving product suite. The visual brand was disjointed by a history of acquisitions and products, each with their own sub-brand. This meant that the vast majority of ZoomInfo assets in market were void of the ZoomInfo name.
On a visual front, the brand expression wasn't particularly unique. For users of the brand across the company and external partners, the visual identity lacked the needed guiding principles for a scaling company.
The Approach
We began by auditing our assets in market and documenting and dissecting our brand house as it existed today. I led the collaboration with our agency partner Colossus to evaluate the brand house and propose new routes ranging from familiar to focused. I collaborated with marketing, product, and sales leadership to ensure the path forward was clear and future-proofed.
The Foundations
Under my leadership and creative direction, we established our design principles and developed the new visual identity of Zoominfo.
We refined the primary logo for a more modern feel, applied a company-wide font change, and set appropriate contrast and visual ratios.
The year-long process resulted in a consolidated visual identity documented in our 120+ page Brand Book and extensive Figma Design System. In an effort to increase mental availability for our brand, we crafted a primary brand that was missing in our former system and artfully simplified our suite of products.
Color
The rebrand involved a complete reworking of our color system. Previously the brand used different color palettes by product, negatively impacting our brand awareness. The new system includes primary, secondary, and extended palettes with extensive usage guidelines and accessibility standards to ensure AA compliance across our assets. Furthermore, the system unified the color systems of Marketing and Product, which long existed in conflicting worlds.
Product Illustration
Formerly our product illustration was overly simplified and failed to exemplify the ease and power of our product. Under my leadership, we rebuilt illustration guidelines and created a library of product imagery. A scalable system of graphic elements subtly call back to our Brand House.
Templates
With the rebrand, we released a vast library of refreshed templates for social images, ebooks, pricing sheets, data sheets, decks, and more. Additionally we followed through to rebrand a massive library of existing content and equip employees company-wide to be brand ambassadors.
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The Results
The rebrand of ZoomInfo was immensely successful, greatly improving brand awareness metrics as measured by Blue Ocean. The reach of digital display content expanded, thanks to the more cohesive and compelling visual approach. We also streamlined the design team's processes, reducing SLAs and increasing efficiency. Finally, we empowered employees company-wide and external partners with an approachable set of guidelines, templates, and Brandfolder assets, resulting in saving the creative team on average 39 hours a month on brand asset requests. Ultimately our work resulted in a refined and unified look across all touch points for the new era of ZoomInfo.