A Brand as Unique as its Brand Story

aifinyo offers freelancers, start-ups and companies fast, uncomplicated liquidity solutions from a single source. The listed company believes in the value freelancers and entrepreneurs add to society. That's why it helps them grow by providing bold, digital solutions for their financial liquidity. This vision is the company's Golden Circle, its why, its how, its what.

We got in touch with aifinyo when pitching for another project, and were asked to develop its new brand strategy, including a new corporate design. Later, the company also turned to us for its website relaunch and a new UX design. For aifinyo, a meaningful brand story was particularly important because it is the basis for everything else to be told and visualized.

Discovering the Brand in a Discovery Workshop

What kind of company is aifinyo? What are its values and vision? What are its main target groups? How does aifinyo behave as a brand? How is this behavior expressed visually? In a workshop, we elaborated this together with the board and a team of aifinyo. We had already used the Golden Circle to highlight aifinyo's vision; now it came to identifying the main target groups and describing them with personas to make them tangible and understandable for the team members.

aifinyo's target groups are not only users, but also multipliers such as network and API partners, as well as billing services that offer its users added value through aifinyo's integrated solutions. We developed personas for the core target groups and thus gave the abstract concept a concrete face, a concrete character. Based on these personas, we also repositioned the brand, which was still too traditional and mainstream. It soon became clear that the defined target groups demanded a positioning in the Premium Progressive segment. Premium here means a service- and consulting-oriented mentality with additional services also attracting established medium-sized companies. Progressive is linked to a certain start-up appeal and a savvy approach to digital.

A Tangible Image of the Brand and its Personality

We now had an idea of our users, but what would the aifinyo brand be like as a person? Again, the goal was to make the abstract concept of the brand tangible and come to life. We had the aifinyo team discuss how its brand would behave, dress, and behave as a person. We wanted to know what living circumstances would correspond to it, what character, what hobbies, what age. We explored the brand from a human perspective. Why? Because user-centered design only succeeds if the brand is also human. Because only then does it invite to a dialog, a dialog at eye level. Between brand and human, between human and brand.

We later included the results of the workshop into a prose text about the brand, derived suitable attributes from it and grouped them into three clusters. We summarized these clusters with the words reliable, dynamic and empowering—attributes that, after cross-checking them with the twelve archetypes, are primarily attributable to the sage who is always also a mentor, advisor and expert. By using attributes of the Everyman as a companion and the Protector as a caretaker, we sharpened the brand personality even further.

The Brand Story as a Meta-Narrative for Communication

The archetypes also served as a starting point for aifinyo's brand story. Above all, aifinyo is a mentor enabling customers to be the heroes of their own stories and to grow beyond themselves. As a mentor, aifinyo passes on its experience and knowledge to the customers, supports them in the adventure of entrepreneurship or self-employment, and in this role also lives up to its brand purpose.

The Many Narrative Levels of the Brand Personality

Using the brand personality as a guide, we went on to define brand filters as design principles. We determined what the brand attributes of reliable, dynamic, and empowering mean for design, communication, and user experience. Reliable, for example, calls for a design with a straightforward style, with a stringent layout and stable typography. We also measured the color scheme against this: Since aifinyo had already defined green as its corporate color, we only modified and adopted it in a more modern way. In a next step, we equated reliability in communication with clarity and precision. For aifinyo this translates into conveying information in a competent and easily understandable way by means of infographics, which only display contents relevant for the user. The navigation is also self-explanatory. It offers orientation and options, above all how to reach the relevant contacts.

aifinyo at any Glance—with a Flexible, Memorable Corporate Design

Given aifinyo’s brand personality it was also clear that only a flexible corporate design could do justice to the brand’s character. Accordingly, in design sprints using agile methods, we developed not only the claim and logo, but also the mood board and style guide, as well as a new UX design for the website relaunch, which features a new user interface (UI), a new site map and navigation. Like this, the users will see at any glance that aifinyo delivers what it promises: smart finance for your business!

More Brands with a Personality

At advalyze and Audi you will find more cases on the topic of brand personality.
Also, feel free to reach out to us. We are excited to hear about your project!