Today marks an exciting new day for ThoughtSpot. We’re officially launching a new brand identity for the company.
While we’re excited to unveil our new logo, look, and feel, a brand encompasses so much more. It’s the sum of everything from your products and services, to how your employees engage with your customers, to how your customers and partners feel when they talk about your company.
We’ve made tremendous progress on all of these fronts over the past few years. From new products and leaders to expanded offices and partnerships, we continue to evolve. And it was time for our brand to evolve, too.
One thing that hasn’t changed? Our core mission. We’re relentlessly committed to helping build a more fact-driven world, whether that’s in the boardroom, the backoffice, or even on social media. In creating our new brand, it was critical that the importance and pervasiveness of this mission come through with even more clarity.
What Does It All Mean?
As we set out to redesign our creative, it was imperative we match our visual identity with our overarching mission. Conveying this link between identity and promise is the foundation for any successful brand.
Here are the key ideas we have always wanted our brand to embody:
Global Enterprise Customer Focus: the global 2000 companies make up a majority of our customer base. Our new brand needed to demonstrate we’re a trusted innovation partner for these enterprises, capable of delivering leapfrog products without sacrificing their quality, performance, security and governance requirements.
Search & AI Technology: Since day one, we’ve bet the farm on search and AI driving the future of analytics. We needed our new brand to balance this history of pioneering industry-leading technology with a future built on continued innovation.
Rapid Growth and Scale: ThoughtSpot has grown significantly since our previous brand was conceived. With our new brand, we wanted to illustrate the momentum and scale we’ve established around the globe.
Fixing Flaws
While a rebrand represented a chance to align our look and feel with the growth of the company, it was also a chance to fix some flaws in our old logo.
Some key issues we needed to resolve included:
The old logo mark was hard for many to read - often people thought it read “STS” instead of “TS”
The old logo didn’t scale down in small spaces like browser tabs
The circle shape of the logo was confining and not easily extensible into other designs
The rounded bubble letter font was too playful - afterall, we shared it with Huggies!
Our primary color of orange was not only limiting from a design standpoint, but made printing with any consistency incredibly difficult
The Process
So how did this all come together? We started by mapping out the core values our brand stands for.
You may be thinking to yourself - how important are words to creating a brand? For designers, they’re the skeleton on which the entire rest of the brand is built. So the precise words are critical.
Alan Fletcher, the renowned Pentagram designer, conducted his famous “Takiti-Maluma” experiment that clearly proved this point. After assigning designers to either Takiti or Maluma groups, he asked them to illustrate what the words meant to them. All of the Takiti designers drew hard, angular, sharp images, whereas the Maluma designers all drew organic shapes with soft, fluid lines. While each was open to interpretation, the words themselves carried power to inform the creative.
We knew we needed to land on the perfect words if we wanted our brand to convey who we are as a company.
After much debate and a long process of elimination, we chose:\
Tech-Forward
Smart
Approachable
We then reminded ourselves the brand needed to project our core product promises - simple, smart, and fast. They represent the guiding light of everything we build.
Finally, because our product can literally be used by every knowledge worker on the planet, we outlined how our brand needed to morph and be flexible depending on whether the target persona for a campaign is an analytics novice on one end of the spectrum, a technical data expert on the other, or somewhere in the middle. We refer to it internally as our “brand slider” and use it to frame every new creative project we embark upon.
Pulling It All Together
After thinking through our core mission, the growth of the company, our community, and the values we stand for, it was time to bring everything together.
So why did we decide on this new look?
First off - the mark is memorable. When you see it, it reinforces our name. T and a Spot. Simple, yet effective.
The main font is modern and clean, while still being approachable. The secondary font (used in the wordmark) is more technical, and true to the nature of data. Just like us and our more technical users.
By using a line and a circle - two of the most basic shapes - we’ve made the mark easily extendable. Scalable, if you will.
The shapes also reinforce our value propositions. The lines can be used to connote speed. While the circle maps to a spot and our purpose to “spot” insights for users.
Perhaps counterintuitively, using black and white gives us more flexibility with color, not less. We see it more like a stencil, than a confined color choice. We can now use as many colors as we need to showcase the diversity of our use cases, customers, partners, and team.
Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in our story, but it’s still just the beginning. As always, we remain only 2% done. Now with this new foundation in place, we plan to launch a new brand campaign later this year. At the heart of it will be our customers and the benefits they are reaping from using our technology. We can’t wait to bring to life all the amazing ways they are transforming their cultures with new access to data insights. Stay tuned!
So what do you think? We’d love to hear from you!