Context
Tribe is a collective of the world’s top AI talent – engineers, data scientists, and researchers – deeply specialized in AI and machine learning technologies, helping companies unlock the power of data for their businesses.
Artificial intelligence technologies are rapidly transforming the global business landscape, fundamentally altering how organizations operate and approach work by increasing efficiency, improving decision making, and creating new opportunities for innovation.
Tribe wanted to meet the growing market need by better understanding their customers and raising awareness of their services. We partnered with Tribe to overcome the critical challenges enterprises face when implementing AI, addressing three complex barriers.
Strategic Research
Conduct methodical user research to help Tribe understand their customer’s needs and market position, enabling them to move beyond endless experimentation to practical AI implementation.
Customer-Centric Positioning
Develop a customer-centric positioning strategy helping Tribe communicate their solution to businesses struggling with technical hurdles and budget constraints.
Brand System Transformation
Drive necessary unification and extension of Tribe’s existing visual language into a foundational brand system, simultaneously improving sales enablement and redefining customer-facing messaging.
Solutions
We led user research and market intelligence to inform Tribe's strategic positioning, and create a unified and expanded foundational brand system.
As a startup with early success looking to grow into the next stage, Tribe needed a foundational base of research across both sides of their market. Deeper understanding of pain points, behavioral patterns, and adoption barriers were crucial to inform product direction and strategic planning.
Our scope included research planning and recruiting, qualitative research, narrative-based case studies, generative discovery, attitudinal surveys, user interviews, marketing intelligence, competitive audits, empathy surveys, and jobs-to-be-done.
Our final report highlighted a wealth of deep discovery – from user personas and core jobs-to-be-done, to validated insights, opportunities, recommendations, and value propositions for both sides of the market.
Insights
01
Lead with empathy
Early in the research process, we employed empathy surveys to help us understand the pain points of the core team. Followup conversations and questionnaires helped us dive deeper into the founders’ vision, enabling us to create a comprehensive research plan.
02
Talk to both sides of the market
The core research tasks involved stakeholder interviews, ranging from Tribe members and customers, to competitors and advisors. We also interviewed members of the Tribe leadership team for their valuable insights into opportunities and pain points.
03
Study the competition
For market research, we conducted a competitor analysis across multiple categories, and a detailed mapping of the competitive landscape including analysis of value propositions, offerings, target market needs, and more.
Tribe’s brand had some existing equity that we wanted to leverage, but lacked a formalized system that could scale across products, audiences, and growth stages. We led an effort to establish the brand, improving consistency across touchpoints and laying a strong foundation for future growth and refinement.
We believe branding must be rooted in up-to-date market information; not just the latest tastes. The user research and market intelligence we conducted for Tribe was a crucial starting point for the subsequent branding effort.
We built on Tribe’s brand equity by creating a design system rooted in research insights. This data-driven, user-focused approach aligned with business goals and positioned Tribe for its next phase of growth.
Insights
01
Let the research inspire
Brand refinement and development began with the outputs from our research phase, including surveys, interviews, competitive audits. These were used to articulate mission, vision, and brand and organizational values.
02
Carefully dissect the landscape
A comprehensive brand audit process expanded our competitive analysis to marketing and sales materials. A comparative evaluation helped us identify differentiation opportunities.
03
Good guidelines make rollout smoother
We created guidelines documenting the brand’s voice for cross-functional use across the company, segmented by audience and output – including site copy, marketing collateral, service descriptions, and more.
Tribe’s creative direction needed to evoke specific emotional reactions that conveyed its newly defined brand as a straightforward, trustworthy, and elite product. Our goal was to leverage these conceptual ideas and tune them for expression on the web.
We created responsive and modular design components for the site as a whole, along with customized illustrations for key pages and assets. We also delivered marketing materials that integrated insights from research and brand workstreams, creating a unified expression of Tribe’s updated positioning and visual identity across digital and marketing touchpoints.
We delivered a unified kit of design components that could be put into use immediately. The kit was deliberately made as flexible as possible to allow for future adaptation in this fast-evolving market.
Insights
01
Root system details in brand goals
Colors, typography, and photography choices were grounded in a need to balance professionalism and expressiveness, allowing for approachability in a technical space, and maintaining visual + emotional ties to Tribe’s brand.
02
Build on pre-existing strengths
We updated the brand symbol, wordmark, and lockups for increased clarity, scalability, and a more technical feel. Due to Tribe’s existing foothold in the market, we chose to iterate on the look and feel, rather than remake it from whole cloth.
03
Constantly check decisions against the positioning
The final creative direction supported core pillars of the brand positioning with Tribe oriented as modern and premium in the competitive landscape when viewed against more traditional competitors.
Outcomes
Tribe has become the premier platform and a magnet for best-in-class AI and machine learning talent, with significant impact across many industries.
Our collaboration with Tribe spanned across a wide set of deliverables including research, creative direction, marketing, design, development, and more. User and market researched informed a full brand system, marketing materials, and a redesigned digital experience.
Implementing the new designs with a full system of web components helped reduce technical debt and successfully launch the new site. These efforts led to a stronger sales pipeline and better conversion with target customers.
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