How those in marketing & creative roles in perceived ‘serious’ industries shouldn’t feel confined by industry stereotypes and should embrace stepping out of the box. By Vasco Vaz Rodrigues, Chief Marketing Officer at Aurum Solutions.
The FinTech industry can sometimes be seen as boring, with serious overtones overshadowing creativity. There is also a deep-rooted belief by some that companies must stick to the traditional tried and tested methods when it comes to marketing activations.
However, in an industry where a creative spark will stand out, it should be embraced, especially when it comes to how a company chooses to communicate to existing and new clients. In my opinion, marketing executives have a real opportunity here to tap into their creative mindset and input their innovative ideas into the overall branding and operations of a company to create cut through in a busy marketplace.
At Aurum Solutions, we have taken advantage of the opportunity to break the status quo and revolutionise the way we operate and connect with our customers. We have recently finished a complete revamp of our brand to reflect our values as a company and showcase the people who make up our business.
We took an ‘out of the box’ approach to challenge the stereotypical ‘norms’ of the technology industry and uncovered the benefits of taking risks and approaching our marketing strategy and rebranding in our own unique way.
Build Your Identity
In previous roles, I quickly understood that many people lose sight of what a brand stands for if they aren’t consistently exposed to it, therefore I was challenged with constantly creating fun experiences and generating a lot of noise. When we first approached our rebrand, we came together as a team and brainstormed what would make the company feel heard, while also showcasing who we are.
We essentially wanted to provide an experience which is a complete step-change and untied from the general misconceptions of how a company within our scope would behave, creating the element of surprise.
When approaching a rebranding task, it’s best to take a step back and analyse what [you] want your company to present to the outside world. Envision what the foundations of the brand identity is and start from the ground up. At Aurum, once we started our rebranding process, we quickly found that our no longer reflected who we are as a business. To this point, we completely stripped back and evaluated every element of our business in order to create a new vision for the future.
The identity of Aurum is centred around our people. We want to both celebrate those in our team who have incredible and rich experience, whilst also recognising and championing our fantastic young talent. Ensuring our team is happy and feels represented by the new vision creates the best environment to provide our customers with the best and most innovative solutions.
You can see this reflected across many touchpoints, such as our website using imagery of actual people in the business today vs generic stock images to ensure we are showcasing the full team, not just the senior members. A company is nothing without its people, the ones who spend their time working to make it better. We wanted to celebrate everyone who makes up Aurum.
Creating Something New
To decide the new look and feel of the brand, we asked the entire Aurum team to share a word which, for them, best encapsulated Aurum. Using these words, we took the most popular ones and translated them into a colour, creating the brand-new colour palette for the brand. This ties into our identity being for the people and about the people. These words and their colour associations include:
- Green: Adaptable, Bold
- Blue: Knowledge, Tech
- Purple: Future
- Dark Blue: Reliable, Premium
- Light Blue: Relief, Teamwork
- Bluish White: Competent, Simple
Taking it a step further, we wanted to create a brand scent that could be known as strictly the scent of Aurum. It needed to strike a careful balance between portraying authority and experience, alongside innovation and youth.
The resulting scent combines Green Tea, Citrus, and Precious Woods with White Flowers and Musk to evoke peace of mind, body, and soul and a calm working environment. At our Aurum offices in Reading, we have the scent wafted throughout for our employees.
The first impression potential clients have of a company starts online. The new website utilises glassmorphism – using the properties of glass to give a transparent look and feel, representing Aurum’s key values of financial transparency and honesty.
Additionally, we have updated our logo, which is a rectangular shape representing an Excel cell, with one corner different from the rest. This shows the visualisation process of Aurum’s process for finding the exceptions within financial data.
Throughout all forms of communication, we evolved and updated our tone of voice to reflect the changes made to capitalise on the ‘Next-Gen Reconciliation Software’ and the updated key messages of transparency and accountability. We are big on our partnerships and relationships with customers and wanted to tie this in with our tagline of ‘Together with Aurum Solutions’.
By tapping into the creative mindsets of marketing executives, those within the FinTech industry can break away from the stereotypical ‘seriousness’ and showcase the ‘other side of technology’ to improve the overall operations of a company. It’s best to utilise all kinds of innovative ideas to provide an ‘out of the box’ approach and ultimately, reap the benefits of taking risks.
