By now, you’ll have seen that Studio Maya has rebranded. Our new website looks fantastic - and ensures that current and potential clients have easy access to our case studies and services.
But not only did we evolve our look and feel - while maintaining our core identity - we also repositioned ourselves in the market, redefining our values, tone of voice, proposition and messaging.
Why? In order to better reach and serve our current and potential clients.
Last year, we took time out to understand our audience and the areas they work in, alongside reviewing our proposition, to see if how we are positioned is tailored to meet their needs.
As a creative business, it’s important to examine your proposition every so often to ensure you’re staying fresh and relevant, maximising on current trends, adapting to changing consumer needs in a crowded space and remaining true to the ethos that’s at the heart of your brand.
We understand that a brand and its position in the market is a reflection of an organisation's values and mission, so we wanted to make sure that we were accurately conveying our services, how we conduct ourselves and the impact we strive to have for our clients.
This is what we did.
Values
The first thing we wanted to do as part of the evolution was reevaluate our values, as these are the basis of everything else that we feel, say and do.
We landed on Honesty, Respect and Care, which are the three sentiments we feel sum up our approach to our work and our clients.
You can read more about how we evolved our values here.
Tone of voice
A brand tone of voice is how we transform our brand values and sentiments into a recognisable tone of voice that will work cross-channel.
We considered our studio persona and what that persona sounds like when speaking in different contexts. This is what we sound like:
Friendly
We’re your smart friend. Everything we know we talk about in a warm tone - one that’s approachable and supportive, not authoritative or condescending. We invite you to learn, to get on board with our way of thinking. We want our clients to feel at ease with us, as well as showcase who we are as people within our brand. We use contractions, ask questions and throw in chatty phrases.
Characterful
We’re not conventional - far from it. Our people are innovative and interesting and so’s our voice. We don’t do cringe or cliche, but we stay away from dry and boring. We’re original and witty, using bold statements, exclamation marks and interjections to inject our personality.
Trustworthy
We’re open, truthful and straightforward. We tell it like it is. We don’t shock for the sake of it, but we don’t sugarcoat things either. We believe this makes us trustworthy and this way we maintain our integrity. A trustworthy tone sounds like short, snappy sentences, knowledge backed up with fact and figures and the active voice.
Alongside tone of voice guidelines, we’ve also created a digital branding toolkit and style guide to ensure that our brand is consistent across all our comms and visual materials. This will launch soon and is something we recommend to all clients. You can read an article Nat wrote about why you need a digital brand guide here.
Proposition & brand messaging
The final piece of the puzzle was defining our proposition - our north star statement - and the brand messaging that goes along with it. It’s so important to us to communicate that we want to work with people doing good in the world - whether that’s for peoples' minds, bodies or souls - and how exactly we do that, through the services we offer.
Our proposition
We're a digital agency working in design, development & digital marketing across the wellness space.
Our key brand message
We do good work we care about, with good people we respect.
Through the website, we’ve implemented a modern design that emphasises our core values in a clear and friendly way and places our proposition and brand messaging front and centre. Not only useful for signposting potential clients, but for SEO too.
Our recent reposition has allowed us to better showcase our skillset and ideas. However, most importantly it has allowed us to refine our proposition, creating a more engaging website with a clear outline of what we do and for who and developing a modern identity that accurately reflects who we are right now after a period of heavy change. As a studio, we’re excited to see how our relationships with current and new clients develop as a result.
