WE RISE
"So, I want to create a program for Women's Leadership..." usually means a few tired tropes – vaguely shaped feminine icons, in pink. Or at least something in pink. Sometimes there are hands, raising questions of what happened to the rest of the leader and whether a hand up is the message we really want put into the universe.
Enter Ibexis, a life insurance company my team had created a brand for at ICR. We built them out further, creating a website that was Ibex-heavy. Insurance companies like mascots (usually), so the concept of an Ibex guiding customers was a no-brainer. We pushed the concept further through requested marketing collateral, making sure to stay far away from absurdist ibex photoshops – Ibexis is an insurance company after all. But then the Women's Leadership ask surfaced, and as I had by this time become the de facto AD on the client, I was excited to get out of their known and make something new.
The Case Study.
The Ask:
Brand a Women's Leadership program.
The Pain Point:
Brand a Women's Leadership program without relying on tired solutions.
The Ideation:
Once a program name of "WE Rise" was selected (shout out to our VP of Copy!), I started my research. It was quickly apparent that there was a lot of women's leadership programs out there. Some were branded thoughtfully, and others were not. It helped me exclude my bad ideas quickly. Exit, oddly feminine icons here.
The Iteration:
The first good concept I had was a ladder – climbing the corporate ladder, or rungs on a ladder, because this program is for women by women. Several iterations had me arrive at two contenders. The first was a logomark of a step joining the WE (Women Executives) to the Rise, because women are both providing the step up while reaching back to pull up other women. A second option that raised the WE onto a platform above the Rise to depict the rising women. To balance out two similar ideas, I offered up a third option, using a feminine script to create a WE logomark which was a nice counterpart for the san-serif Rise portion of the logo. I also shortened the very-long-asked-for tagline on this option, hoping it would prevail for the final selection.
The Validation:
I pitched my concepts to Ibexis' Chief Marketer, the COO and the CEO. They selected the first step option, albeit with the long tagline. Onto the next challenge: making this concept work across different tactics.
The Brand Expansion.
Now I needed to think through how to pull my brand concept through to other creative pieces. There is more to leadership than steps on a ladder, after all. I also needed to think through some copy.
The first piece I needed was a series of notebook covers for swag at an event. I started to play with different ways to incorporate my step logomark and realized it could be so much more than a step depending on how it was rotated. On my notebook covers, it became handles for growth when I bracketed copy, and my headline wrote itself.
For the senior and junior leadership booklets, I wanted to continue the idea of so much more. "We + verb" was a great way to play on the WE acronym of Women Executives, while building on the community idea and explaining the program goals. I used the logomark to literally support the explainer copy in the tagline while pointing to the logo which also served as a explainer continuation. The back cover continues the play on We and WE, imploring the Senior Leader to be the best WE (Woman Executive) and part of the community at the same time.
Lastly, a banner ad. I continued the explainer, using animation to flip through the different ways women could benefit from the program. I also took the opportunity to raise the "rise" of the logotype, to nod to the idea of the elevation part of the program.
