The number one reason any company is acquired is that the team who are buying them sees opportunity. When we first had a look at Teach 'n Go - we went off and listed some of the areas where we thought we could improve. 🚀
One of the first areas where we felt we could improve was the overall branding of Teach 'n Go. It had been several years since the branding had been changed, and we thought that a vibrant new colour and design would set us up for a great start to 2019.
1. Experience
We wanted our customers to feel like they were part of something special — an experience. If we were providing a world-class education platform, then why not have a world-class brand to sit behind it?
We looked into the school management software space and saw a lot of serious players (and not in a fun way). Nobody had a brand that stood out as fun and engaging. Most followed the old way of teaching — boring and predictable.
This is where Abs and I saw an opportunity to revamp the look of the brand and create something unique to the SaaS education landscape.
A fun, appealing brand that delivers the best school management software in the world.
2. Recognition
Everyone will know what brand this is — they will even know its tagline: "just do it."
Simple. Easy.
Nike didn't just put its tick on a billboard in New York and suddenly everyone stood back, pointed and said: "that stands for the world's biggest sports clothing brand." No. This was created over years and years of quality service and product.
How can we be like Nike?
- Unique logo
- Unbelievable product
- Exceptional customer service
We can take learnings from this. Put simply: a logo doesn't create a brand — the product and customer service do.
We want teachers to have a seamless experience when using Teach 'n Go. At the end of the day, they purchased the software with one goal in mind: to manage students and classrooms seamlessly in school software.
3. New Beginnings
2019 is a new year for Teach 'n Go. We plan to completely revamp how we conduct business inside and outside our platform. To do this, we felt that we needed to step away from the old and push forward with the new.
We sat down as a team and wrote about what Teach 'n Go meant for us: how we wanted our users to view the application and how we wanted new customers to see us.
We felt that Teach 'n Go needed 3 new things:
- Logo
- Colour
- Landing Page
Logo
From the outside, everyone sees the shiny new logo.
To us, we went through days and days of designs, revisions and then eventually agreed on the new logo.
Colour
Abs and I are from Dublin, Ireland. Anyone who is familiar with Dublin will know it has a very proud heritage — draped in the colour blue.
We decided that we would rebrand with the colour blue. Little did I know how many variations of the colour blue there are 💙
#3658ff — blue. Light blue? Sea blue? Ocean blue... it’s actually midnight blue (or close enough!), and it makes the website look awesome.
Landing Page
You wouldn't drink tea without milk... so why would we create an awesome logo without an excellent website!
We decided to strip back a lot of the page and rebrand it into a clean, slick user interface that focused on what's important.
To stand out as the best school management software in the market.
We want our brand to be synonymous with this.
Feedback
During any process like this, you always create self-doubt — "what if the users don't love our changes?" was a consistent worry for me as we chopped, changed and reworded the branding.
We knew we would have to get our customers to give us feedback as soon as possible — what better way than to launch a campaign within Intercom.
2019 — the world is an extremely busy place. We sat back and thought about what we would like to receive and how easy we would like to reply.
We decided that all users would get a simple pop-up in-app message when they logged back into the application.
Here's what we decided to go with — and the feedback was super!
We chose two of the top emojis — so users would have only two clicks to provide us with feedback on the changes. The result was unbelievable: we managed to get a massive return on feedback — all 😍 positive.
All of the revised logos and non-stop coffee was worth it.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading about the process behind re-branding our SaaS.
With love,
Mark
