Behind the Rebrand: How we came up with a Joyful Klook!

Joy is only made up of three alphabets, but to us at Klook, it’s a huge turning point, one that took us 2 years to unveil to the world. Here we are today, reintroducing ourselves as… Your world of joy! 

Not all companies have the privilege to launch a rebrand. We consider ourselves fortunate to have a whole team of passionate Klookers blending together to make this possible (Thank you, #TeamKlook). 

And when we talk about rebranding, we can imagine a large task force behind it (think Marvel’s Avengers but more powerful). One of the fundamental contributors is our Brand Marketing Manager, Evelyn Phoa, whom we caught up with for a deep dive into the behind-the-scenes of our rebrand.  

Evelyn Phoa

Brand Marketing Manager

Why was there a need to give our brand a new look and tone of voice?

A few months before the pandemic, we were experiencing triple-digit growth. Up to that point, as a start-up, we've been very focused on getting our product right, making sure our features and functions are well-built. As a part of the rebrand, we wanted to make sure that we were going beyond a transactional relationship to a more emotional one with our users. We wanted to be able to attract global citizens that have similar values to ours and share the same passion for travel and zest for life. That was the starting point of our rebrand.

How did you find inspiration for our rebrand?

Superunion, a branding agency we worked with, helped simplify our brand to what really matters. This was a culmination through surveys, workshops with our co-founders,  stakeholders like our merchants, Klookers, as well as customers. So, it's all about distilling those conversations and finding common patterns on what we are currently good at, what has worked for us in the past, and our aspirations for the future.

How long did the whole survey take including drawing insights? How did the team make sure that the survey reached a wide audience? Was there any tactic used to encourage people to respond to the survey?

About three to four months, we did it in two ways. One was collecting results from the general public with the help of an external research agency. This included people who have and haven't heard of Klook for an objective overview. The second one we did in-house reach our own users via CLM (customer lifecycle management) through Iterable and we gave them a small incentive for responding to the survey and also with the help of our local teams. 

Why did we choose Joy as our main theme? 

Travel and leisure things-to-do has always been our bread and butter, and the reason we invest in these experiences is that they give us some kind of added benefit – whether it's transforming our mind through learning about new cultures, discovering new places, or simply recharging and staying inspired. All of these bring joy to people. Joy differs for each individual, but at the end of the day, we go out and take part in these experiences for joy.

The team had to brainstorm many different taglines that might stick in the customers’ minds. But how did we settle with “Your world of joy” in the end? And were there any other taglines that your team also brainstormed?

We had another close second. That was an almost-tagline situation. It was called From here to joy. The idea was that we’re the bridge that connects people from here to wherever that joyful destination is, as we play a role as an entire ecosystem that connects merchants and customers to each other. 

We went with Your world of joy in the end because it encompasses that diversity of experiences on our platform regardless of category. By adding the word “your”, it’s more personalized and gives the power back to the user. It’s about what joy means to you, and you can find it all on Klook’s platform. So Your world of joy won us over in the end.

The crew behind our rebrand - giving birth to fun ideas and engaging in fruitful discussions remotely. 

Since we’ve been working remotely, there could be some obstacles to communication. Do you think this rebrand could have happened much earlier if we worked together in person? What were the challenges along the way?

Rebrands are not always a two-year process. We were waiting for the right time to go to market. So I would boil down the biggest challenge into three things. 

Because we were preparing for this rebrand in a pandemic, we weren't sure when the rebrand could be launched and hence some decisions took more time than needed – such as our visual identity. Since it's so subjective, we could almost delay these important decisions to a later date. Having time is important but too much time is also not great. 

The second thing is learning to disagree and commit. With such an emotional and artistic endeavor, there are so many ways that it could go and storytelling is never a black-and-white answer. There are many ways we can do it. So we had to learn to come together and debate about it candidly, then whatever the final outcome was, every team had to go with it and execute it as if it was their own vision. 

My last one is backing art with science because art is subjective. How do we try and create more frameworks to make it an objective process? Take the logo as an example. We referenced Paul Rand’s logo grading system, in which we graded the logo against seven criteria, including adaptability, simplicity, timelessness, etc. So whatever decision that we end up making is based on some kind of scientific analysis.

Read more:  Curious about our brand logo and visuals? See behind-the-scenes here

What’s your biggest takeaway from this whole rebrand?

For us, it's going beyond the surface. We were lucky to have the luxury to do many workshops and collaborate with different teams on how they could support this brand strategy and think of how it influenced their day-to-day work. We thought about what this rebrand means, how customers can interact with our new brand and how that impacts them, not just what this rebrand looks like.

We have a joy personality quiz where people can come to our platform to win coupons. The joyful experiences we recommend to them are customized to their personality. It's a promise of your world of joy. We're trying to learn more about them, know what they like, and direct them to suitable activities that they’re going to enjoy. 

Think you know your personality well enough? Not until you take our joy personality quiz! 😛

How do we make sure that our brand remains recognizable to the public?

Ubiquity and consistency. We make sure that our brand is everywhere as much as possible. We find ways to drive awareness and top-of-mind recall, and make sure there’s a level of consistency globally. In the past, an ad in Indonesia might look very different from ads in London. What we want now is that if I'm in Singapore and traveling to London, I can tell those ads are from Klook right off the bat.

This is how we picture our ads on the streets – or anywhere.

How do we measure the success of our rebrand?

We look at the brand awareness funnel. It starts from awareness, consideration to preference and so on. We can't measure rebrand the way we do with tactical campaigns because ROI (return on investment) is not an accurate reflection, and any uplift in traffic is just temporary. It's more important to measure brand through longitudinal surveys over time.

To give you a rough idea of what the brand funnel looks like.

Another thing we looked at, which is a very important part of this rebrand, is the internal sentiment, participation and engagement. If Klookers are not engaged, that means our branding efforts will only be a one-off. However, if they’re invested in this process, they will use it to guide their day-to-day work. It was very nice to see so many Klookers changing their headshots and posting about the rebrand on LinkedIn. It felt like we were very united!

Evelyn and Beatrice were the entertaining hosts of our Klook Live! Joy Experiment edition.

With your experience in rebrand, what advice would you give to other companies who are looking to do a rebrand themselves?

Give yourself sufficient time so that you can go beyond the surface and involve everybody in the company. But it's important to make sure that you're pulling in the right person at the right time to move efficiently.

All set to dive into a world of joy?

Find your dream job at Klook

  Posted by Klook Careers