Carwow, the online car marketplace has unveiled a full rebrand led by branding agency, Ragged Edge, as it strategically repositions itself as the car-changing marketplace for life-changing moments.
Set around the insight that it’s often lifestyle changes that drive consumers’ car-buying habits, the new brand will include a fresh logo, marque, colour palette and tone of voice - the company’s first change since launching 14 years ago.
To learn more, we spoke to Ben Carter, Carwow’s Chief Customer and Marketing Officer.
What was the brief for the rebrand?
The way we buy and sell cars isn’t working. It’s confusing, time consuming, and with so much choice it can be tough to know where to start.
At Carwow, we understand you’ll change your car for many different reasons throughout your life. It’s the second biggest financial commitment you’ll make after a house, so we want to make sure that experience is inspired by possibility rather than fraught with uncertainty.
We recently reworked our vision, mission and values in line with this, and we wanted to use the opportunity to refresh the brand with three objectives:
- Level up the visual identity of the brand.
- Act as a global marketplace.
- Solidify our position as the go-to destination for cars, with a personality.
As a brand, we always have an opinion. We’re independently minded and unapologetically honest (sometimes a little bit too honest!) so really don’t mind what you buy or sell, we’re just here to help you make the right choice, with total confidence. We felt that idea lived in our content but not our product, so it was part of the brand's job to provide a formula to connect the two.
We wanted the new brand to be clean and modern but pull through some of the personality that makes our social content so successful. That emotion had no place in the brand or our product but we wanted it to tangibly live across all our touchpoints and this work was the foundation for that, as the product was also rebooting in line with the new value proposition.
Lastly, in a world of very noisy neighbours (!), we wanted to establish ourselves as the authority within our category with visuals that would stand out and a memorable tone of voice.
How did the initial pitch/brainstorming phase go?
We were looking to work with a team that was brave, innovative and could help us flip from being a noteworthy challenger brand, to a market-leading, global auto-tech firm.
We found this in Ragged Edge. After the pitch, they took the time to immerse themselves in our business, interview key stakeholders and execs and gain an understanding of the business and our culture. We helped them delve into the product (with demos led by the product team) and customer research, provided by our in-house market research team.
Next was a creative changemaker session. This session was designed for Ragged Edge to gauge our likes and dislikes, push our thinking and get us in a creative mindset about the direction we wanted to take the brand in.
The next phase was the concept presentation. Following all their research, Ragged Edge presented us with the initial 3 concept routes, from which we selected the 'big deal' route we later progressed with.
Describe the purpose of the brand and its target audience
Our purpose is to drive total car confidence. We want to be the go-to destination for drivers buying or selling a car, and everything in between. Changing your car should be exciting, full of anticipation and enjoyable, so we try to instill a bit of that in everything we do.
The heartland of our audience is older men, aged 55-70. This group has extremely strong car confidence! ( it's worth saying that men typically say they have more confidence in transacting than women). Nonetheless, this group has typically bought and sold multiple times, and are happy buying and selling online. But we see a big growth opportunity with men and women aged 35-54 who operate with some car confidence, have bought and sold before and would consider buying and selling online.
Over the next 3-5 years we also want to target a younger audience, maybe those with less car confidence who have a limited idea of what they’re looking for and need a little more persuasion to buy and sell online.
What was your thinking behind the rebranding solution?
We wanted to move from what we were in 2011, ‘a new car comparison site’ to 2023 and beyond ‘The go-to destination that empowers drivers to discover, buy, sell and drive cars with total confidence.’
The rebrand was shaped around the concept that it’s often lifestyle changes that drive consumers’ car-buying habits. Our new brand declares that “car-changing is a big deal, and Carwow is where you come, to get the big deals done”.
So our thinking was we wanted to take our customers to a joyful, transformational and momentous place where the typical car buyer or seller worries about car costs or it being a stressful process are non-existent, and where choice feels satisfying, not overwhelming.
The redesign features a bright colour palette as well as bold use of shapes and car imagery. We have a much more modernist font and we use it in combination with bespoke pops of colour - we created a ‘Big Deal Blue’ and a ‘First Car Red’. We wanted a new marque that captures the ‘wow’ in our name - but nods to car-changing through being a circle - suggesting movement and progress.
Our tone of voice has also shifted up a gear into the new user experience that’s split into two ‘modes’ - the ‘car’ side and the ‘wow’ side. The car side is designed to speak to the car enthusiast; it’s straight to the point, rational and informative and details the facts and figures that everyone wants to know, while the ‘wow’ side represents that extra human insight Carwow helps offer customers.
We have new lifestyle-led photography directed by creative agency, Lovers and production company Pavillion Works, which features unique angles and centers on diversity in gender, age, ability - giving customers accessible inspiration as they go through their car-changing journey on the site.
Did you learn anything new during the project?
Maybe not new, but it definitely confirmed to us that listening to our customers is a surefire way to build for success!
We’ve got an extremely popular Youtube channel (over 8 million subscribers!), and a big part of its success is that Mat (our Chief Content Officer) and the team are excellent at listening to what viewers want and delivering on this.
It’s an approach we took with the brand, constantly testing and learning messaging and visual identity with existing customers and getting their input as we went. It’s something we’ll continue to do as we move forward. After all, our customers know us best.
What was the biggest challenge? How did you overcome it?
Remembering we now have a capital ‘C’ in Carwow!
In reality, it was aligning the success of our content with our new brand. Part of the reason for updating the brand in the first place was the old brand felt a little too functional when compared with the world of content we put out.
Ragged Edge did a great job of bringing in that opinionated, independent voice that our Youtube channel is famous for. We’re not a dealership. We’re not biased. We just offer our opinion, which our customers trust.
What kit/tools/software were used to create it?
For our rebrand we used Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, After Effects and Figma.
What details are you most proud of and why?
There’s a lot to be proud of; it’s the culmination of months of hard work across the business and from our partners.
We’re big fans of the joyful new visual identity, which means we get to push our creative to the next level. The fact that we have a playful, opinionated and momentous tone of voice is amplified by our visual assets now, and I know our brand team is relishing the opportunities it affords us.
Most of all, we’re proud of the fact that this isn’t just a rebrand that – by updating our user experience at the same time, we’ve made sure this runs deeper than the old brand adage, ‘a fresh coat of paint’. The enthusiasm and pick-up from across the business, and from our customers, has helped us make this new brand a part of our DNA pretty much from the word go and it will propel us to our next phase of growth.
What visual influences fuelled your solution?
We looked both inward into the category, as well as outside the industry for inspiration. We looked at some fintechs (neo banks), other tech cos, other marketplace businesses too.
It was good to see what others had done with their brand in high-spend categories to help build trust with consumers, while still having a fun and playful brand.
Ultimately though we can take inspiration, we wanted to stand out in our market and create something unique to us that other car companies don’t feel like. After all, lots of companies enable people to buy or sell cars. We’re different; we’re a destination where people can change cars. So we’re very excited to have a new brand identity that feels so memorable, momentous and modern; exactly how we believe changing your car with Carwow feels.
What do you hope it achieves for the brand?
We want this to signal a new phase of growth for our business. The rebrand was always supposed to align with our business objectives – providing a marketing moment to show our customers that we’re the destination for car-changing moments.
We also want it to bring a new level of consistency for us, so that customers will recognise our brand wherever it lives.
What would you do differently if you could do it over again?
We only wish we’d done it sooner, really. We’ve had nothing but positive feedback from our original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners and dealer partners and our customers - so it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Credit list for the work?
Ragged Edge - Branding agency
Lovers - Creative agency
Pavillion Works - Production company
