It’s never a small decision to change the look and feel of a business.
Even if you’re not selling a product that sits on shelves, you still need customers to recognize you and have an affinity for your brand.
You need good rationale for changing, and a clear ‘why’ behind the new brand so you’ll know which direction to take.
Pequity set off on this journey near the end of 2021, and now, in January 2022, we’re launching a refreshed brand.
Here’s how, and why, we made this change—plus a look at our fresh brand.
THE BRAND THAT LAUNCHED OUR SUCCESS
Take a look at Pequity’s original logo.
It’s playful, approachable, and perfectly positioned for startups.
This brand got us where we are today.
We created a product that customers who are household names depend on daily to do their work, and incredible investors and partners that believe in us and our mission.
But we’ve learned a thing or two selling Pequity these past couple years. We’ve learned that our initial target market of startups and small businesses had evolved as the product evolved.
Pequity is a great fit for mid market and enterprise companies as well. So we wanted our brand to better suit these new upmarket customers like Instacart and Robinhood.
That was our first reason for seeking change.
The second reason is, with our Pequity Pup being part of the logo, and “Pequity” sounding like “pet-quity” when pronounced, most folks assumed we offered pet insurance at first glance.
We needed to clarify our offering, and mature our logo. So we asked employees and customers just how much they believe the brand should change.
2 out of every 3 respondents said we should “change some of it – like logos and colors.”
This validated some of our concerns with the current brand, and also taught us that most folks were emotionally attached to the brand.
But most importantly, nearly all were open to exploring something new.
REFRESHING A BRAND WE ALREADY LOVED
We hired an external branding & lettering expert to explore how we could improve on our brand.
And we went through a lot of options.
We even took surveys of the best options, asking questions like, “What’s your knee-jerk reaction to this branding?” and, “Would you be excited to join this company?”
Answers to those questions helped us make informed decisions on the direction of the brand.
Here’s one example of a logo iteration we didn’t keep.
The feedback on this one was split right down the middle.
50% of survey participants felt positively about it, while 50% of survey participants felt negatively about it.
Most respondents (66%) agreed it was more upmarket, so we did accomplish some goals around positioning for enterprise.
But the split opinions on general affinity told us we swung the pendulum too far, losing some of our magic and approachability.
Most surprisingly, we learned that 33% of survey participants said they would not want to join Pequity – based on this logo alone. They assumed our culture would take a hit with this branding move, and the majority of those that responded negatively were current employees.
Reading through the feedback, we learned that we were uprooting the current brand rather than refreshing it.
So we kept searching for a better balance.
OUR NEW, UPMARKET BRAND
We learned so much exploring these new branding options.
We loved including the ‘=’ in the logo as a nod to pay equity, and wanted to better refine how we present ourselves without losing our design-driven brand.
So, we took all that feedback back to the drawing board.
And here’s where we landed.
This new brand gives a nod to the brand that got us to where we are today, while positioning ourselves for what’s to come.
The Pequity pup is no longer part of the logo, and has been promoted to a mascot that employees and customers can rally around.
We worked the ‘=’ into the logo and our favicon, which everyone loves, and we improved the readability of our logo for improved accessibility.
This brand—our new brand—is built to scale, and designed for humans.
Keep an eye on us as we make 2022 a breakthrough year for compensation tools, pay equity, and easier workflows for folks in HR.
We can’t wait to see what this year brings.
Kaitlyn Knopp + Warren Lebovics
Pequity Co-Founders
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