Hey Reader,

You know that feeling when you’re talking to someone much smarter than you, and they say something that makes you go “of course, why didn’t I think of that before!”?

That’s how I felt learning about Dropbox’s end-to-end framework for branding from Executive Creative Director Liz Gilmore in the latest episode of Inside Marketing Design. Let me tell you a little about it and some ideas I have for applying it to my much (much) smaller team at ConvertKit.

The Dropbox approach to end-to-end branding

We all know that consistent branding increases the level of trust someone has in your product or company. It’s important that brand plays a role in every interaction a potential new user has with you; right from the first time they see you exist, to their research phase on your site, to signing up and using the product, and even all the way through to a cancellation screen should they choose to close their account. Every touchpoint is a chance to reinforce your brand and build trust.

At Dropbox, they break up these touchpoints into three pillars: See. Buy. And Use.

See focuses on the brand applied to advertising, social, conferences… places where someone might see Dropbox and be reminded that they exist.

Buy involves the marketing website(s) where a user might arrive at to research and make a decision to sign up for an account.

Use is the way in which the brand is applied to the product itself, to ensure that brand affinity is still being built within the app, and that there’s visual consistency for the user the whole way through their onboarding journey.

And not only do Dropbox use these pillars for talking about the ways their brand is expressed, but there’s an Associate Creative Director in charge of each pillar too. This ensures there’s an advocate for each stage in the end-to-end journey, and that the work gets done to improve them.

Applying this framework to a smaller team

I love a good framework. If I let it, my mind will run at a million miles an hour and my thinking will branch out into different chaotic directions. A framework helps to focus my thinking and simplifies the chaos.

The concept of brand being applied to each stage of a users journey is not new, but when I heard about the See, Buy, Use pillars from Liz a lot of things started to fall into place in my head.

I’ve been leading the newly-established Brand team at ConvertKit for the past year and I’ll be honest, this expanded scope of responsibility has overwhelmed me at times because the sheer amount of opportunity there is to improve not only the ConvertKit visual brand itself, but also the way it is expressed in all the various touchpoints a creator has with us. There are so many touchpoints y’all. So much great work going on that brand could help add value to. And I had to figure out where to put our efforts.

I’ve muddled my way through this year, but it wasn’t until Liz shared this framework that I started to see ways to group all the potential projects into buckets. Instead of thinking about the thousand and one touchpoints we could improve individually, how about just thinking about three groups: Our brand on assets that go out into the world, our brand represented on our own site, and then how it appears in the product. See. Buy. Use.

We don’t have the team size to put someone in charge of each pillar like Dropbox does, but here are some of the ways I’m considering using these insights (in case you’re on a small team too that could benefit from it):

1. Our design system – Setting up components and templates for use in the assets being created for each stage of the user journey. This would mean the product team could access useful brand illustrations and textures without also having their asset panel filled with marketing site UI components.
   ​
2. Our project planning – To make sure each pillar is treated with importance, perhaps we could ensure we’re working on at least one project each cycle that aims to improve in each stage of the journey.
   ​
3. Our metrics of success – I’ve been struggling to find the right overarching metric to measure the impact of brand (and brand design specifically). Maybe I could find one for see, one for buy and one for use instead? Watch this space.
   ​
4. Reducing overwhelm – This one isn’t an application of the pillars themselves, but in future when I find myself getting overwhelmed by too much potential and too many directions to go in; I’ll ask myself if there’s a way any of them can be grouped to give me more focus.

Watch the full interview

Liz shared so many great insights in this episode including how she got buy-in from the team for this See Buy Use structure, how Dropbox works with agencies, implementing a brand refinement and much much more.

Watch the episode

​

---

​
Looking for a new marketing design job?

Here’s three roles I recommend you check out on the Inside Marketing design job board.

Sendible (featured in IMD S02E01!) are hiring a marketing designer.

​Check out the role​

HelpScout (IMD S02E02!) are hiring a brand designer (you’d be joining the team with Matt, who featured in the interview).

​Check out the role​

AngelList (not featured in IMD yet, next season maybe??) are hiring a Brand and Marketing Design Lead.

​Check out the role​

​

---

​

I was going to be off to Norway this week for a remote work-cation, but due to the rising case numbers there (and in the countries we would have had to transit through), we decided to cancel. Instead I’ll be staying home and putting up the Christmas tree! And probably streaming some more live design work on YouTube. Maybe you’ll join me for a stream?

Have a good week,

Charli