Unknown Speaker  0:00  
One of the things that we were sort of grading, I guess this design system on or one of the lenses that we were kind of applying to it was like, how ownable is this? And how will we be able to sort of stand out and be ourselves and be sort of instantly recognizable, not just on the day that this launches, but like down the road?

Blake Howard  0:30  
Hey, everyone, welcome to a change of brands behind the scenes stories of rebrand glory, drama, and disaster. I'm your host, Blake Howard. I've been leading rebrand projects for close to 20 years, and I know firsthand the ins and outs of a major brand change from time to money to politics or promotions. It is a process that is deeper and more complicated than most know. Over the last decade, the public has become painfully aware of the rebrand process and their voice in judging the results. Brands like Netflix gap, and Tropicana just to name a few have become victims to blow back headlines, and internet outrage. And that's important context for those entering into a change of brand. There is nothing more frightful than being added to the epic fail roster in the pages of brand history. And beyond the court of public opinion, getting it right with your boss and with the customer. And justifying the investment is what concerns brand leaders the most. So this series is about going behind the polished finished product to learn more about the strategy, approach and decisions made along the way. And my hope in these stories, whether fame or fail is to be helpful for future brand leaders facing a change of brand. And in this first episode, we're talking about the MailChimp rebrand from back in 2018. The work was led by Collins out of San Francisco and introduced a bold new color to their palette, a redesigned mascot icon, a word mark and a very expressive system with some oddly charming illustrations. Now it wasn't just about a logo change, it was about a much bigger positioning effort. And if you're not familiar with the work, we've got images posted on the website, a change of brand.com Be sure to go check those out for yourself. And for those that don't know MailChimp is a tech unicorn in my hometown of Atlanta and much loved by the creative community worldwide. And for more background on MailChimp. Let's go to brand strategist Sarah Gail Hughes for a segment we call the brief in

Unknown Speaker  2:53  
what we now know is MailChimp really began with some of the same elements that we see in the business today, a passion for small businesses, and a bit of an irreverent energy and helping them in 2000, a guy named Finn chestnut with a couple of his friends Dan fuzziest. And Mark Armstrong started a company called Rocket Science Group was a company focused on web design for large companies and a lot of different industries, tech travel real estate, their whole focus was really trying to win those people over. But they realized the companies that they actually enjoy talking to for small businesses. However, they only really were asking for email marketing. And that was a small piece of all they could do within their company. They started thinking about it. And there was this product that rocket science group had developed at some point in their history. It was focused on email greeting cards, and never really took off. They decided to take that software to repurpose it and use it for those small businesses and that need they had around email. And it was super successful. It was then they decided to hedge their bets on email and small businesses fully focusing on that email marketing app. And that's what we know today is MailChimp. legend goes the name was inspired by a specific card within that old software that they originally wanted to name it chimp mail, but that was taken. Regardless Friday, the mascot you can still see in every iteration of the brand became the champ behind MailChimp. Eventually, MailChimp evolved growing and scaling to become a 1200 person business that made $700 million in 2019. Maybe a more interesting number that could be found in their 2019 annual report was the amount of active MailChimp customers 12,328,937 people using their platform. Also, I find this really interesting the average amount of emails that sent each second by MailChimp customers is 10,794. They made strides targeting that small business owner with one specific insight designers were the ones who are creating the most marketing emails and that so their creative personality that bit of irreverence is what's one piece Over the past 19 years, they're really relevant features. And that personality is what allows MailChimp to stand out from competitors like constant contact person in blue, that kind of quirkiness has taken them to some pretty funny places over the years. The first time I heard of MailChimp was probably like a lot of people, and they promoted their company with that mail camp sound bite on cereal. The first Mega podcast

Unknown Speaker  5:21  
support for cereal comes from MailChimp from MailChimp mail came Shem more than 7 million businesses around the world use MailChimp to send emails, newsletters, and deliver high fives MailChimp

Unknown Speaker  5:36  
send better email. Very nice, I use MailChimp, you do I love MailChimp started with email marketing for small businesses, then focusing on the needs of the small business, they made their service free after a few years and sort of a shocking move. After some time, they decided to expand their offering to all things marketing for that same group of people. And at that turning point in history of their company, they decided it was time for a rebrand.

Blake Howard  6:04  
To get the inside scoop on this change, I sat down to talk with MailChimp Head of Brand Mark de Kristina. He's been with the company for 11 years now and was hired early on the 16th employee. And I asked him what it was like back then when he first started, I was actually in a cubicle, which is really funny and not, not like Milchin culture at all. Really,

Unknown Speaker  6:28  
I think that the company had just expanded into a little bit more space. When I started, they had these cubicles to help them make use of it. But we probably got rid of them within a couple of months of me being there. But I remember that from the first day, it was a startup, you know, Ben and Dan started the company in 2001. So I when I started in 2009, it was not a new company, but it was very small, very scrappy, and operated very much like, you know, typical tech startup, I think one of the things that really sort of stuck with me about those early days was just how much of the brand. And the sort of DNA was already present. Obviously, we were called MailChimp, we had the, you know, Freddie mascot, but the values and the sort of sense of mission and the customers that we serve, like that really has not changed in all these years. And I think part of that is then in dance leadership. Part of it is the way that the company was structured, but they still show up at work every day and, and lead the company today. And so in some ways, having that bedrock of really strong leadership and values and not being beholden to investors or shareholders has really helped preserve all of those values, and also created just a tremendous amount of consistency in the employee experience. And obviously, I think that translates to customers experience as well.

Unknown Speaker  7:43  
Did you ever think it would grow to a company? close to a billion dollars?

Unknown Speaker  7:48  
Yeah, I really did. You know, when I first took the job, I was very naive, and I really needed a job. I was coming out of an independent media company, I was about to lose my job, and I really needed a job. And so when I landed at MailChimp, my thought was, this seems like an interesting company, I'm interested in being in an early stage tech company and helping grow it. Email doesn't sound super exciting, but they seem like good guys. And, you know, this is a great place for me to land and sort of work for a while. But until I figure out what to do next, I learned really quickly that it was actually a really special company. And yeah, before long, I really did feel like you know, the sky was the limit, like this could really be something that got really, really, really big. So yeah, that wasn't totally a surprise to me.

Blake Howard  8:30  
Even though email isn't the most exciting material to start with, Mark saw the potential and he had big ambitions. And to his credit, it's not like he was starting with a clean energy brand like Tesla, or an athlete driven endorsement brand like Nike or even an entertainment disruptor like Netflix. It's email, like spreadsheets and text messages, a communication commodity. Mark felt like that was part of fun. I'd like to build one of the greatest brands in the world. And if I could do that, with email, it's sort of like starting at this giant deficit. And if I could email something, a brand that people love, that would really be something special. MailChimp has had many brand changes over the years. Founder Ben chestnut created the first logo back in 2000. With this flat MS Paint like Freddy that's kind of endearing nowadays. And then a little bit later, he was sort of Pixar given some depths a little bit of shape, a little bit more 3d. And in 2013, Jessica Hische, a well known and incredible graphic designer and typographer tweaked their script Wordmark. And all of that was pretty evolutionary. But the change in 2018 was revolutionary, the biggest change to date and I asked Mark,

Unknown Speaker  9:50  
why. Simply put, you know, our brand had kind of grown like a weed. There were no rules. Everything was extremely expressive and creative, but there was no concern distancia there was no real through line to like any of the work that we were doing. We had that script and we had the Freddy, he used to be a mascot at that, you know, at one point, I guess in the 2008 Refresh, he went from being this little face to being a full blown like yet whole body carried like a male satchel. And then in, I think it was in that 2013 refresh with the Jessica Hische refinement of that script, word Mark, we sort of removed his body again, he became an icon again. But besides those two elements, we didn't have a color, really, we didn't have any rules about illustration, or photography. And so in some ways, that was exciting. And I think it led to a lot of great work and helped us become sort of known for doing interesting creative stuff. But on the flip side, it created a lot of problems. I mean, we didn't really build much equity in any of the stuff that we did, some of it was so far out that it you know, I would imagine, probably a lot of people would see things that were MailChimp ads that wouldn't, they may never know, it was even a MailChimp ad, people who knew what they were looking at made it flat, it was really great. But it wasn't great at like, you know, building awareness or affinity. And it meant that every project that we did was like starting, like we could do anything, every project with design was like, what do we want to do. And so it was like this whole exploration, and it didn't allow us to move quickly. It didn't allow us like pull parts and snap them together. And it sort of hindered our ability to be creative. In other words, probably as well. So that was really what we were trying to solve is how do we create a little bit of structure in this brand and find opportunities to begin to build equity while maintaining some of the flexibility and sort of chaos and the brand that we liked, and we wanted to continue to do, but maybe put it in a container that would help be more recognizable to people help us move more quickly. That was sort of the idea.

Unknown Speaker  11:45  
And then on the opportunity side, you were also scaling and growing the offerings, right? You're going beyond email for your customers, what was the thought behind that? Like, was there research that said, you know, you're so pigeonholed in email, you've got to do X y&z to get out of that that sort of drove the reason to make some of the change, or what was some of the larger offerings conversation as well as related to brand?

Unknown Speaker  12:07  
Yeah, that conversation was really listening to our customers, we were not feeling pigeon holed by email so much as we heard consistently from our customers that they loved how easy email was, and they wish that we would do something like MailChimp for ads, or they wish we could do something like email for websites or whatever the case is. And so that was just a very, very loud theme that we heard consistently from our customers. And so our mission has always been to help empower, enable equip small business owners and entrepreneurs. And it felt like building a platform that would enable them to do more of their work and have it integrated and be more powerful, more intuitive. That was the way to go for us.

Unknown Speaker  12:47  
So you've decided to make some change, you need some clarity, you need some structure, some definition, how did you decide what was going to remain kind of core to the MailChimp brand? And how did you decide what was up for grabs,

Unknown Speaker  13:00  
we knew Freddie would stay, we felt like there might need to be some work done on Freddie, he wasn't like really the greatest icon yet some for some challenges with him, but of any of the sort of assets that we have in our brand. Like he's the sort of most valuable, we knew that we wanted him, we wanted to continue to build equity in that icon. But otherwise, it was sort of open season. And again, like we were really thinking about how to achieve this sort of balance of, like I said, creating some structure and also allowing there to be a lot of creativity and expressiveness. within that structure. We talked about this phrase throughout the whole process of creating a container for our chaos. And so like we didn't want to stop being playful, we didn't want to stop being expressive. We sort of wanted to be able to, like break the rules, but we wanted to do it sort of in this safe zone where there was like a core color, a core, you know, set of assets that we could sort of lay on top of that chaos, and it'd be sort of like a picture frame for the brand. I think that we wanted to keep Freddie and we really wanted to keep that spirit. But we had to sort of create some definition around how and when to pull that out and see how far we would pull it out.

Unknown Speaker  14:08  
What were you looking for from an agency for that type of work?

Unknown Speaker  14:11  
It was a tricky process, because we wanted a partner who had the level of craft and the level of experience of like a, you know, giant name brand branding agency, but we also wanted sort of the cultural attunement and the sensitivity and the distinctiveness that you get from like a smaller agency. And so we interviewed a lot of agencies, we talked to a lot of different agencies. And at the end of the day, we just really felt like the team at Collins, and that in particular, really was like a kindred spirit and really matched that criteria. So well, sometimes you meet someone and you just feel like you're on the same wavelength. It's just like that energy was so good, and it just felt like we could complete each other's sentences from day one. Yeah, it was kind of you know, love at first sight a little bit.

Blake Howard  14:59  
Okay. So at this point, the story mark and the leadership team at MailChimp are bought into the reason for change. And they found a dreamy agency partner with Collins and in particular, Matt luckhurst, the creative director of the San Francisco office. And now for the fun part, we get into the work. And I am a lover of the process. To me, it is the biggest factor in determining whether the rebrand is labeled fame, or flop. So I asked Mark more about the process that dreamy Matt and the Collins team led them through,

Unknown Speaker  15:35  
there were a bunch of different phases of the project, I can't remember off the top of my head exactly what they call those phases. But you know, they're the typical phases you go through where there's like this, you know, discovery phase, they do lots of interviews, and they're collecting data, there's a sort of synthesis phase, a strategy phase, where they're trying to kind of like, make some hypotheses are sort of provocations. And then we finally get into creative development. And so that whole process leading up to the design phase was super collaborative. I mean, we were kind of like, in lockstep having tons of conversations, they would come visit us, we'd go visit them, and it felt very natural. And then the creative phase, as creative as those things can be like it felt that way. I mean, they may have gone away for like 10 days or something. But it didn't feel like it was a super long time, they actually brought us five directions. And they were fairly fleshed out. We visited them in San Francisco, and we had sort of the one of those big reveal conversations where they walked us through their thinking, and these five different directions, all extremely different from one another. Like, I was so impressed with how distinctive each one was from the other. It wasn't like, you know, direction, one, A and B and C and D, it was like, just like, we're in totally different universes, they were all in their own way very compelling. But we pretty quickly honed in on the direction that became what is the militant brand today, it wasn't exactly like what you see out in the world today. But it was shockingly close. Like I kind of when I think back on that project, I sort of can't believe how they just nailed this thing, like, super quickly. So it wasn't like a scenario in which we were like, Let's take direction two and three and four, and kind of like, you know, Frankenstein them together, it was there, like this direction feels really strong. And it's super different than really anything we see in the world today, it feels like us. And it feels like there's room for us to evolve it and expand into it and learn about it and grow into it. So yeah, it was a cool process. But they like I said, there were lots of different directions. Like one of them, for example, was they had this idea that because MailChimp is sort of democratizing all of this technology. And we're for the little guy, and we're helping enable all the small businesses that they built this entire design system out of free software. So like fonts from like the font, and stock shapes, and clipart and all just like sort of public domain free stuff. And it was like, it was very cool. It didn't feel like the kind of thing that we ultimately would be right for us. But we had, you know more conversations about the than you would think that was

Unknown Speaker  18:14  
the crazy one, they threw in there thinking they'll never go for this. And then and then for about 10 or 15 minutes, they were getting really nervous, like, oh, wow, they might they might actually go for this. That was cool. So what was it that made you decide on the MailChimp look and feel that we know today? You know, like, what was it the yellow? What was it about that direction that you all ultimately fell in love with?

Unknown Speaker  18:34  
I don't know. I mean, some of it's a little bit intangible. Like it just it felt right. It had in it enough of a point of view that it was ownable one of the things that we were sort of grading, I guess this design system on or one of the lenses that we were kind of applying to it was like how ownable is this? And how will we be able to sort of stand out and be ourselves and be sort of instantly recognizable, not just on the day that this launches, but like down the road? And how can we sort of set this system up in a way that will kind of put us in a territory that no one else is in or that maybe no one else is like necessarily wanting to go that was important to us. So it checked that box. It also checked this sort of picture frame box, you know, like for you I think might have been the same in each design. But the word marks were all different. And actually the first word mark in the system that we ultimately went with was very different than the one that we have today. It's like more like a handwritten thing. I still to this day. I really love him. I think we made the right call with what we went with. But it was really cool. Like just handwritten, had the sort of like 90s like skate magazine kind of vibe to it. That felt really good. And it was like very editorial. This system really checked that picture frame box, the container box like the yellow, you know, there's just not a whole lot of yellow brands in the world. Black and yellow felt really great. And it just had these very simple components that would, like I said, match that sort of distinctiveness box but also give us lots of room to play was

Unknown Speaker  20:01  
that a consensus on the MailChimp side, you know, because a lot of times the buy in on all leadership within the company for single direction can be tough. So I'm curious what were the co founders roles in that what was the decision making like in that process, and what's the MailChimp side completely like good to go unify?

Unknown Speaker  20:20  
I would say as far as these things go, it was as clean as it could have been, you know, there's a lot of trust at MailChimp. So for myself, and for Todd Domini, who was the creative director that I was working with on this project, they put a lot of trust in us and in our ability to sort of handle this project and evolve the brand the way it needs to. And so there's a lot of difference to the way that we wanted to do it. And Todd and I were very aligned on it. At the same time, I would say it was not like, this is what they were going to do kind of thing, there was a little bit of, you know, there's some socializing, certainly with the co founders, but also like the design team, getting buy in from the people who are gonna be using this system every day. And so that was, you know, one of the biggest, I wouldn't call it a hurdle, but it was like it was the the part of the project that was the most sensitive, there was the most room for things to go get squirrely because by the time that we brought a recommendation to the home design team, like we kind of knew what we wanted to do, but we didn't want to kind of force feed it. And so we actually presented three directions to the design team and sort of crossed our fingers and hoped that they would see it from our point of view, people had their own feelings. And it's such a big change that there was definitely some, you know, a little bit of anxiety about it. And some people feel like this is gonna create some challenges for us and the normal things that you experienced when when you experienced a big change. But people really liked it. They were excited about it understood why it was a good decision. And it wasn't nearly as painful as these things can be. Oh, I'm sure.

Unknown Speaker  21:50  
Can we nerd out for a second about the illustrations? Because I think that was the big part. You know, the simplification of Freddy, in the really thick letters in the word mark. That was all great. But it felt like as an outsider, the illustrations was sort of the accent in the whole design system. You know, how did you all land on the concept of these like elongated forms and weird animal human mashups? What were some of the thoughts behind illustration stop,

Unknown Speaker  22:18  
I guess, take a step back. One of the insights that we had in the strategy phase, or one of the tenants that we established in that face was this sort of description of ourselves and how we how we talked about ourselves. And they came up with this really nice phrase that they call the expert, absurdist. And there are lots of different ways we describe that. But it's basically like, we want to be sort of masterful in our approach as a brand, we want to be authoritative, we want to sort of demonstrate that we are trustworthy. But we also want to have a lot of fun. We want to use that mastery in ways that are unexpected. And there are lots of sort of people historical figures we talked about when we were sort of talking about, like who that archetype is. And so Walt Disney was one that we talked about the ark, the artist, the singer is another one, people who are like masters of their craft, but had this very strong point of view that can be fun, it can be subversive, it can be strange, it always deploys that strangeness. So that surreality in a way that is purposeful, and fun. And with a wink all the time, that insight is sort of what I think led to that design. I mean, you can see that approach really well in the illustration style, which is, appears to be sort of naive and childlike, but is is actually a very hard. I'm sure you, as someone who illustrates things, I'm sure you know, it's like it's deceptively challenging, they have to look bad, and just the right way, you know,

Unknown Speaker  23:44  
I'm curious around the messaging side, because a big part of this, when you rolled it out, was going beyond email. There's a lot of specific language about empowering small businesses. And it felt like MailChimp went from being the option for your email marketing for creative folks to now helping entrepreneurs market their small businesses in general. And language is a big part of that. So it's way more than just the visual side, what was the effort like around finding the right brand voice around the right language, to talk about specific offerings, or even just sort of this new brand position for MailChimp,

Unknown Speaker  24:22  
on the sort of voice and tone side, we did a fair amount of work on that in this project, but it was more about sort of documenting, articulating, sort of creating some rules around a lot of things we already did. So we didn't set out to sort of change our voice or change the way that we talk to people, but we hadn't ever met. Well, it had been a long time since we had really codified like, exactly sort of what our voice is and how we use it, when and where and so we did a lot of work on that to sort of sort of look at all of our content across the whole sort of ecosystem. And we did some you know, we did some sort of pep talks here and there. And there were things that maybe previously didn't work as well now, and some things we want to do differently. But yeah, we basically just went through and created some new rules that were pretty high level and universal, but things like were very plain spoken. So we don't use a lot of jargon. We don't talk down to people, we sort of speak at people's level, we were very conversational, our humor is dry, there is a lot of humor in our work, but it's not sort of slapstick II goofy in your face, it's sort of subtle, and a little deadpan, you know, maybe a handful of other rules like that, that we wrote down to help sort of synthesize the way that we write and message things across the whole experience,

Unknown Speaker  25:40  
did some of this impact little moments when you use the overall platform, like when previously, when you would send an email, there's this moment, where you get nervous of, okay, I'm about to hit send, and then you finally get the guts and you click Send in the little Freddy monkey hand would pop up and give a high five, and it's like this little celebratory moment, dad, some of those things change, you know, like with the, with the voice of being a little bit more plain spoken a little bit drier, and some of those like little comical moments change in the platform and the user experience,

Unknown Speaker  26:13  
I would say that they evolved sub, like we didn't do away with those things entirely. In fact, like, you know, that that high five, and the sweaty finger before you hit, you know, push send, like, those are two of the most, you know, sort of beloved moments in the history of our brand and people's experience with it. And so we're careful with those things. And I would say we look for more of those moments, the illustration style might be different, or that interaction may look and feel a little bit different than it did prior to this rebrand, but we actually want more of that stuff and experience it does make the whole thing feel more human and like, you know, there's someone home and you're not just start interacting with the computer.

Blake Howard  26:49  
Okay, so mark, the MailChimp, team and Collins have accomplished a monumental task. They have a new visual identity and refreshed brand voice that they feel really good about. But how would the rest of the company feel? And what about the court of public opinion? After the break, we hear more from Mark about the launch strategy and if this change of brand makes headlines with fame, or fail Hey everyone, I want to take a quick minute and give a nice hat tip to match stick our producing partner for this show. They are the brand identity house of the south and help challenger brands become radically relevant. If you need help clarifying your message or standing out in the market. Be sure to visit matchstick.com That's ma tch sti c.com. And also, this is a new show. So if you are enjoying this first episode, do me a favor and share it with a friend or two. Just think about those Uber brand nerds that you know, you know the ones that are often complaining about bad fonts or calling out the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo. Yeah, we know there's an arrow in there. Okay. That's what happens when a capital E is next to a lowercase x. You know folks like that they're in good company here at this show. Hey, and while you're at it, be sure to leave us a review on Apple podcasts that helps others find the show. And I'm going to be selecting my favorite each week to give away a special prize.

Okay, so back to the MailChimp story, Mark and team have decided on a design direction and have done most of the work. But what happens next is critical. rebrands don't go awry in the creative process necessarily. It's more so in the launch, it's sort of like jumping out of an airplane to go skydiving, that's actually not the scariest part is when you pull that chute to see if it opens. So I'm curious to see how they rolled it out. Which for beloved brands like MailChimp, this is where the story could take a turn for the worse, maybe even get a little bananas. Get it MailChimp

Unknown Speaker  29:11  
a bit MailChimp hates monkey ponds.

Blake Howard  29:13  
Anywho, here's what Mark said,

Unknown Speaker  29:16  
between sort of defining what the system was and then launching the system, there was a good four to six months of time. And so there's a lot of opportunity to begin to socialize it informally with different groups. And then, you know, obviously, we did sort of a big formal presentation to the company, introducing the system and why we made the changes and how it would help us achieve some of our strategic objectives. And then people started using the system, you know, obviously well before it was rolled out and so people got comfortable with it. We had we built a whole website and we made changes inside the product and our advertising changed and so by the time the thing actually became public, I'd say employees were

Unknown Speaker  29:54  
pretty comfortable with it. In that process. Were there any dramatic concerns that popped up internally, you know, Like, did you start hearing an aggregate of worries about, you know, little things that might be like the reproduction of the yellow and that that yellow coat can be hard? Or how are we going to endure these illustration styles like where they're like tactical things are very nuanced. The surface?

Unknown Speaker  30:16  
Yeah, for sure. I mean, those are, those are probably the two biggest examples, actually, that you just said one was not so much will yellow get all but like, how do we use yellow in a way that is going to be the most impactful and we probably shouldn't like slather it on every single thing because it will start to kind of burn your eyes and it'll dull all of your other senses a little more sparingly and use it in real life sort of brand moments. So that it it has the impact we want it to so it's a little bit more like a spice than like a like a mayonnaise, econometrician. But you know, a little bit goes a long way, the illustration style, that was a hard thing to master. I mean, we have some fantastic illustrators on the team at MailChimp. But it took a lot of practice to get everyone comfortable with that style to understand sort of what felt like a successful illustration and what maybe didn't quite clear the bar. So we have ever lots of workshops, lots of explorations, everything from like, no line way to like, you know, the the subject matter of the illustration to the the level of absurdity. Like there's just, it's such a complex illustration system that I mean to this day, it's still the one thing in the system that I think it's the most challenging, I'd love

Unknown Speaker  31:29  
to see the examples of where the illustrations crossed the absurdity line. Like that should be a little mini campaign that you guys launched, like, here are all the illustrations that were too absurd to use.

Unknown Speaker  31:40  
That's funny. Yeah, I'm sure we've got some some good ones.

Unknown Speaker  31:43  
So how did you start thinking about the public launch? Like what were the concerted efforts to the strategies around rolling this out publicly,

Unknown Speaker  31:50  
it lined up really nicely with a big ad campaign that we had been planning. And so we sort of combined the introduction of this new brand system with the launch of this ad campaign and some new functionality of the product. So it was sort of a big bang, where all of these different channels kind of came together to make a big splash. And so we worked with RGA, who was our ad agency, they helped us both with the website and also with the ad campaign that accompany the launch.

Unknown Speaker  32:17  
Was there a moment where things were about to go out? Like you're about to flip the switch? And did you get some anxiety? Like was there a moment where it was happening the next day? And you were you nervous? Or were you like, finally, I can't wait for the world to see this? How are you processing that?

Unknown Speaker  32:33  
It was definitely not the most anxiety I've ever had about a launch at MailChimp. I mean, there have been others that have where I've felt much more nervous. This one felt pretty good. Like, I know it's good. But you know, there's always that anxiety of like, what are people gonna say? Is there something like super obvious that we're all missing that somehow is like someone's gonna tweet about and then if we're just gonna get completely clobbered by this really stupid thing that we should have seen a mile away? That kind of thing that's like, oh my gosh, is there something like super insensitive or offensive in here that like we just haven't seen like, but besides that, I was like, I wasn't doing

Blake Howard  33:09  
luckily for Mark and his team. The public launch was met with much fanfare Fast Company at age and many others wrote raving reviews for the work and for the effort. Of course, there were some naysayers because, you know, hashtag the internet. Like a user named mind wave who bluntly said I like absolutely zero about this. That was a comment on the popular brand new blog website, or David S on his own blog wrote, I am curious why cute Freddie has been replaced by animated Dr. Seuss birds, I asked a few MailChimp users about the rebrand. And here's what they said, I think

Unknown Speaker  33:53  
the Freddy icon in the old brand feels a little bit like out of the kids novel or something on the new brand, it definitely feels like it's more accessible for all people.

Unknown Speaker  34:03  
It's awesome that they're owning a color like yellow. It's a statement piece, something that a lot of brands don't have the bravery

Blake Howard  34:11  
to do. To be honest, it was hard to find any negative feedback or dirt on this change of brand. Most commentary is singing high praises and sounds like this.

Unknown Speaker  34:22  
They've really kind of given the middle finger to all of those other technology companies. Now they're really bringing that fun and quirkiness and those characteristics and our personality rights for their brand identity.

Blake Howard  34:33  
And as for Mark Well, he's pretty pleased.

Unknown Speaker  34:37  
It's such a huge relief when when there's not that like you know, super negative reaction. So that was the dominant feeling was just like Thank God this went smoothly and didn't blow up on our faces. MailChimp is a company that is known for its creativity and its brand and so it wasn't like a super big surprise. But yeah, that stuff is so nice, as confident as I was that it was Good, I had no idea that it would be so well received, I don't know of a whole lot of like rebrands, like that, that are both sort of critically praised. And also that like, you know, the general public also love sometimes it's like one or the other.

Unknown Speaker  35:14  
It's like the Rotten Tomatoes. You know, critics gave it a 100. But the audience gave it a 12. And it's like a black swan kind of,

Unknown Speaker  35:24  
or vice versa. Yeah, it's, I just felt so happy about that, it was that that part was surprising for sure.

Blake Howard  35:30  
This was a risky undertaking for MailChimp, but it had a massive reward. As I process this story, here's what I feel like they did right, they had a clear problem to solve to create more visual consistency. And to contain the chaos as Mark put it, they also had a good reason to change. They were upping their offerings and repositioning how we've always known them as an email provider to become much more being all things marketing for small businesses. They also found a partner that they trusted and gave them the warm and fuzzies this type of change requires the right partner. It's not only months of your life working together, so you'd better click with those people. But there also needs to be an immense amount of trust in their expertise and their ability to lead you through the process. The moment a client doesn't trust their agency partner and starts to second guess all of their work. That's the moment they grab the reins, and turn the value of that agency down into order takers and not expert guides. And this typically cripples the results of the work because that outside fresh perspective is neutered and taken away from the process. Politics and insider thinking that comes with the in house perspective, can dominate and it's a bit like cutting your own hair, it's just not a good idea. And when it came down to the work, Collins had solid thinking and research and MailChimp had the courage to choose a direction that was bold and different. Lastly, they were inclusive in the process and rolled it out brilliantly. It was an inside out sort of approach and was bolstered with an external ad campaign. Overall, I think Mark sums it up best when I asked him if the change of brand was worth. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  37:31  
absolutely. I feel like we really nailed the objective. You know which, going back to the beginning of the conversation, you know, we really wanted to create a container for this chaos inside MailChimp that I feel like we did that very successfully.

Unknown Speaker  37:44  
What's next for the MailChimp brand?

Unknown Speaker  37:47  
Feels like we're just getting started.

Blake Howard  38:00  
If you want to get more on this show, or on this episode, head on over to a change of brand.com links will be in the show notes. And as always help us spread the word with those fellow brand nerd friends of yours. And while you're at it, leave us a review on Apple podcast. Today's episode was edited by Matt Owen. A special thanks to Sarah Gail Hughes for the research. Shout out to mark de Christina for his time and for this interview. And last but not least, thank you Malik Fox for today's artwork. I'm your host Blake Howard signing off

Transcribed by https://otter.ai