Whisk’s journey began way back in 2012 when founder Nick set out to create a mobile app that creates shopping lists based on recipes.
Fast-forward nearly a decade later and Whisk had grown into a global remote team of 12 employees, with a high number of daily active app users, and a couple of successful rounds of investment under their belt.
However, while the app was proving popular with everyday foodies it was proving difficult to monetise and scale.
With this in mind, Whisk challenged Notepad to explore new positioning for the company which could unlock their real growth potential.
Here’s the story of how a shift in Whisk’s brand positioning tripled the size of the company in just 6 months, leading to an eventual multi-million dollar acquisition by Samsung.
Our approach to this challenge started with some solid research. Through a series of virtual workshops with the Whisk team and extensive market, competitor and customer research, we developed the following insights:
Through weighing up all possible routes for the Whisk brand, it became clear that the company had a huge and untapped opportunity to sell Whisk’s expertise in food behavioural data direct to businesses. Whisk needed to shift from B2C recipe app, to B2B food data platform.
Our work started by uncovering what truly made Whisk unique, and articulating their new proposition:
‘The world’s smartest food platform. Whisks technology enables businesses to build integrated, smarter, and more meaningful digital food experiences.’
Whisk’s competitive advantages in the marketplace are their unrivaled understanding of breadth of food data, their world-class partnerships, and their own in-house cutting edge technology. Their new proposition sums this up in a way their target audience will understand, and positions them as the best solution in a relatively unchallenged market.
With the proposition nailed down, we then created the tagline ‘Smarter food experiences’ to sum up the key benefit of working with Whisk, and showcasing their new focus on helping to power smart technology.
Nick Holzherr,
Whisk Founder and CEO
Whisk tripled in size within 6 months of rolling out the new positioning created by Notepad.
Within 18 months of the repositioning, Whisk were successfully acquired in a multi-million dollar deal by Samsung Next.
Whisk have now grown from 12 to 150 employees within Samsung, taking responsibility for all operations across Samsung Food
As with the strategy and articulation for Whisk’s brand, we knew their new brand identity needed to showcase the right balance of tech and friendliness.
As a business, Whisk is all about helping people to make connections. They connect over 7 million data sources to help brands understand people’s online behaviour with food, and they help brands to better connect with their customers.
Our process didn’t follow the standard agency approach of:
1. Client briefs agency
2. Agency does some work and presents it for feedback
3. Client likes some bits and tells agency to do more
4. Agency does more work
5. Client gives more feedback
6. Repeat steps 3 – 5 until we find a solution or someone loses it and flips a table.
Instead, we took a completely collaborative approach to creating Whisk’s identity. Once we’d outlined a general look and feel and nailed the logo, we handed over the raw files to Whisk’s design team and let them go wild. We then iterated on their work, and passed it back again. This carried on until everyone was truly behind the new identity and completely understood how it worked.
The duotone design of the abstract W logomark helps to visually communicate ideas of connection, and data processing. We then applied this duotone approach and rounded visual style subtly across the brand’s various touchpoints to create a completely connected brand identity that’s recognizable, future-proof and ownable.
To further help the brand portray Whisk’s human and playful approach to business, we used a palette of fresh and healthy primary and secondary brand colours. And to communicate their focus on data without looking like every other data company, we used uniform, spacious and vibrant food photography to make the brand more approachable and friendly.
Stuart Renshaw,
Whisk COO
See what it was like to rebrand a company completely remotely and hear from the Whisk founder along side Notepad founder Naeem.
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