Connecting people with brands, everywhere
Connecting people and businesses in today’s digital landscape is complicated. In 2008, Sinch’s founders set out to transform customer communications and make it a “sinch” for businesses to engage in meaningful conversations with their customers, where and when it matters. In less than 15 years, the company has turned into an international powerhouse serving enterprises across the globe and handling over 600 billion engagements per year — talk about hypergrowth! Sinch’s Customer Communications Cloud now supports messaging, voice, email, video, verification, and more.
Sinch’s brand carries a responsibility of awareness and visibility, and Frontify helps the company continue to grow, adapt, and shine. Speaking with Gwen Lafage, VP of Brand and Content at Sinch, we’ve tried to pinpoint what makes brands tick and what role they play and should play on a much larger scale.
1. Guiding the brand perception, not controlling it: An organic process of collaboration and brand engagement
Brand perception
For Gwen, brand is perception, which means some things can be controlled while others can’t — but those things can at least be influenced.
Gwen Lafage
VP Brand and Content
And that’s the role of a brand team in a company: To establish a strong brand foundation — from shaping its visual identity to creating a clear positioning and crafting a strong message that people can identify with — and then bring it all to market. The Sinch brand must join people together internally and rally them around the same story. This has not been an easy task for the company, which has grown rapidly organically and through acquisitions since the early days. The need for more internal alignment around brand and its core values has therefore been vital to offering its customers best-in-class services.
Gwen Lafage
VP Brand and Content
Uniqueness, culture, and design
The culture and people at Sinch are its strength, so the brand identity has to represent the company’s core values: striving to keep things simple through hard work, collaboration, and creativity. The recent transformations that boosted these values and made them more visible included a brand refresh in 2021. Since then, the brand has continued to evolve, building up its visual identity and conveying a unique blend of who Sinch is as a company, its customers, and its employees.
2. It takes big and bold investments to build a brand, even with a great product
Challenges and acquisitions
Defining and polishing its identity with an external agency allowed Sinch to see what was working (and what was not). The company made adjustments along the way — a brand is alive, after all, but navigating even the positive changes can be tricky. With the acquisition of several companies, more brands and, with them, more complexity was added to Sinch’s portfolio. Their consolidation under one roof was always going to be challenging, as there isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Thus, navigating constant change requires a solid and consistent story in continuous “work-in-progress” mode. Keeping a high level of quality throughout this process further complicates things on a global scale, which is why Sinch combined in-house designers with agencies to help build up the hub and make the design stand out.
3. Your brand is your people — so investing in your brand is investing in your people
Brand community, engagement, and a strong employer brand
As we know too well, a brand can only be as strong as the people behind it: They’re the ones carrying the brand everywhere. In other words, a brand can be ruined for someone just because they had a bad experience with an employee. Employees must be your first brand ambassadors, as they’re your most important representatives. So, facilitating a community and employer brand is essential to building a strong brand — probably even more so in such a fast-moving and unforgiving environment like tech. This makes strong visibility and awareness indispensable for success, which always starts internally and needs to be nurtured. Employees play a very important part in this equation — they’re the experts who sell and represent the product. People buy from people. So the role of a brand team is to set the foundation, build up employee advocacy, and create a brand that empowers employees to become true ambassadors at every touchpoint.
Gwen Lafage
VP Brand and Content
Before and after
It’s important to understand that building a brand hub takes time and work. But in the long run, the process is completely worthwhile as it becomes your only source of truth for all things brand and enables it to continue to evolve while always in touch with those that use it. This is especially evident as the company continues to grow globally, with more teams needing to use the brand in all lines of work. So, easy access and a more explicit connection to the brand have resulted in better, more implicit engagement with it.
Gwen Lafage
VP Brand and Content
Jan Ritter
Director of Marketing
What’s next for Sinch
As Gwen highlights, Sinch will focus on strengthening employee advocacy and turning employees into brand ambassadors throughout 2023. That’s where the brand journey will continue to grow and help shape the Sinch of tomorrow. What an exciting journey to be part of!
Sinch has used Frontify since 2021:
→ Brand Guidelines
→ Digital asset management
→ Digital and print templates
Headquarters:
Stockholm, Sweden
Company size:
4,000+
Industry:
Cloud Communications
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