Global financial powerhouse BBVA needed to refresh its outdated brand identity. Spring Studio was brought in to re-imagine not just the visual language but also the content. As the lead content strategist for this ambitious project, I developed and presented voice and tone guidelines used by content teams in 13 countries.
Banks today have largely become purveyors of commodities — one checking or savings account is pretty much like any other. BBVA was determined to break out of this “sea of sameness,” not only in terms of the products and services it offers customers but also its brand look and feel.
To kick off the brand redesign, BBVA came up with a new brand purpose, shown here. Everything that we developed had to support this idea.
Scenes from our war room: Our team did a lot of benchmarking, brainstorming and creative concepting to develop the new brand.
These are some of the new BBVA colors we selected.
Some content should be localized for individual markets. We wanted the photography used across all channels to reflect the lifestyle and culture of its intended audiences.
A company’s brand voice should be consistent and instantly recognizable in whatever form the content takes, although the tone may shift based on the context.
The first step in developing BBVA’s new brand voice was to identity its personality attributes, which are often expressed as a series of adjectives. We created these pairs of attributes based on the new brand purpose.
Eventually we boiled down the list into five pairings of adjectives.
It’s important to unpack the meaning of each attribute for content creators. I like this format because it’s simple to create and easy to understand.
It’s not enough to simply describe what a brand sounds like. You need to provide examples for how to write — and how not to write — in that voice.
The End Result: Ultimately, brand voice is a key to building relationships with customers. I'm really proud that the guidelines I created were adopted by the bank and its teams worldwide.