Chegg brand guidelines — Kelly Egan Poetry

Giving creativity the limitations it craves

Chegg brand book expansion

The problem

An extensive audit of the past two years of creative assets made it clear that the end-to-end experience from prospective customer to product user was disjointed across the work of different teams, repetitive rather than evolving across the customer journey, lacking in storytelling, narrative, and emotional connection, and overall missing opportunities for tighter, bolder creative expression.

The overarching source of the problem was also clear—our current, agency-authored brand book was much too high level. Not only did it lack tactical guidance for creative decision-making, it also led to siloing as different teams came up with divergent approaches to their surfaces.

Our approach

To tackle these issues at their root and engender a strengthened era of brand expression and creative leadership, our team developed three new scaffolded and interlinked frameworks to unify, clarify, and define creative strategy across different teams and touch-points. These frameworks created a solid foundation that allowed all teams to make creative decisions that would simultaneously built toward a unified and yet flexible brand experience. They also created opportunity for bigger creative swings at different stages of the customer journey.

My role: Lead creative/brand strategist

Along with an interdisciplinary team of writers and designers from both marketing and product, I was a key player in developing the new frameworks, voice guidelines specifically for copywriters, and sample artifacts showcasing the new creative direction. I also took a lead role in training the team on the new guidelines and evangelizing them to our partners.

Impact

As a direct result of enthusiastic cross-departmental adoption of our new frameworks, the creative team was granted a major role in fall campaign planning. The resulting 360 campaign was hugely impactful, far outperforming assets from the prior year across most channels.

Aside from the numbers themselves, our work was a major cross-functional success. The frameworks created a shared language of both ideation and critique, significantly improving communication and collaborative capacity both within and across teams, fostering a greater sense of ownership and awareness of brand identity.

Chegg brand principles

While our high level brand traits indicated how we ultimately wanted to show up as a brand, we needed a framework to determine how we would get there.

Adhering to the dictum that it’s not what you say, it’s what you do, our brand principles highlight the actions we take as a brand to live out the promise of our brand traits.

The principles are a high level set of actions, providing a common, end-to-end ground for marketing and product teams alike to draw from.

Chegg brand persona

If our brand principles outline what we do as a brand, our brand persona framework dictates how we do things—the character and charisma that shines through each action we take.

Again, this served as a framework for teams creating assets across the full length of the student journey.