Workinis a company that repurposes unexplored spaces for coworking and flexwork purposes. Their goal is to offer 360o services to companies and professionals looking for disruptive and lifestyle-focused offices, providing them a work experience based on the principle of work-life balance. Their first space opened in June 2021 in Edifício Transparente (Porto, Portugal), and their main goal is to expand as opportunities emerge, allowing their community to grow and positioning them as a top entrepreneurial, innovative, and creative hub in the country.
The challenge
After two very successful years of growing and nurturing their community, it was finally time for Workin to focus on themselves. After a few kick-off meetings and conversations, JMR proposed a brand sprint challenge to the Workin team members, which they quickly accepted. This format would not only help meet the brand’s goals for a clear brand message, mission, vision, future achievements, and core values, but would also solve a few of the pre-existing communication and marketing strategy issues they had previously faced.
Our approach
The Brand Sprint
We kicked off this project with a three-hour Brand Sprint session, during which we tackled a few focal points of brand development, split into six different exercises, moderated by the JMR team. During each exercise, all Workin participants would provide their own individual input from the brand’s point of view. Later on, a designated decision maker would come to a final conclusion.
- 20-year plan: Created to help us think about the lifetime of each brand, this exercise helps us think about the big picture and create a structured idea of Workin’s goals.
- What? How? Why?: With the goal of touching base with the brand’s core mission and vision, this exercise was created to define and clarify three very important questions: “What does the brand do?”, “How does the brand do it?” and “Why does it do it?”.
- Values:The team proposed and voted for the top three values that the Workin brand lives by and aims to implement on an everyday basis.
- Audience: The fourth exercise had the Workin team reflect on who qualifies as an audience for their business. Much more than the ideal customer persona, the goal was to answer the question “Whose opinion do you actually care about?”.
- Brand Personality: Workin participants were invited to envision their brand as a person. How would she be? Friendly or authoritative? Serious or playful? No matter the answer, this exercise is always the first step toward developing all communication rules, tone of voice, and other crucial brand elements.
- Competitive Landscapes: Comparing your brand with its competitors is never easy, but that’s what this exercise is all about. After gathering and placing all their competitors in the matrix, participants had to think about where the Workin brand would fit and if that placement made sense for their upcoming 20-year plan.
Graphic Revamp
After the conclusion of this first session, we analyzed all the gathered information and realized that Workin’s values, purpose, and message were not fully aligned with the brand’s identity. This led us to, on top of developing a new and improved brand book, revamp the brand’s logo while embodying all focal points from this unique and rich sprint. With this in mind, our creative team took it upon themselves to:
- Solidify Workin’s identity by elevating their logo with a new approach and typography.
- Set a font hierarchy for all future written, physical, and digital communications.
- Define an amplified and precise color palette with an established set of rules.
- Define a functional and personalized tone of voice.
- Create a diversified plethora of patterns to be implemented on both digital and physical platforms such as merchandising, social media templates and posts, internal and external presentations, flyers, documents, etc.
Results of our work
This brand sprint helped Workin solidify their communication and marketing strategy thanks to a thorough and well-structured brand book, representative of the brand’s personality and long term goals. This document, which will also be a key element for the brand’s growth, will help all current and future internal members understand the brand and feel included in this amazing project.
To top it all off, this sprint was accompanied by an improved logo and identity, equally related to the brand’s energy and personality.
This was the first step toward turning Workin into a top-of-mind brand in the coworking and flexworking industries, all while embracing its passion for a coolness-focused lifestyle.
Tools we used
Miro | Asana | Illustrator | InDesign