Last year we wrote about why we felt we needed to revisit our branding and bring it more in line with the requirements of our business.
New identity:
To be clear, it wasn’t just a case of feeling our old logo was soooooo 2009 and that, having raised some investment, we could afford to spank the brand gods. Rather, we realised that our business needed something different.
When we started out we didn’t really know how retailers would react to us imposing our brand onto their customer journeys. We didn’t understand the practicalities of what was possible, or more importantly what our brand needed..
We’ve spent much of the last year talking to our customers, our retail partners and other stakeholders. Fortunately everyone liked the name…
We concluded the business required something that retained the charm of our rocket, but which was bolder, more distinctive and owned it’s own space. Ultimately, we felt our logo needed to be a badge that could be willingly displayed across any/all of a retailer’s channels communicating that they offer Shutl delivery. We also needed it to be ‘buttonable’ to help us build a more consistent and uniform Shutl user experience, irrespective of which retailer you Shutl from. Given that we aim to serve retailers across the value spectrum, this is not an easy challenge.
Our new logo incorporates a strapline that not only addresses the problem we are solving, but also our ambition.
New delivery options:
We’ve also taken a long hard look at how we position our service options. To date we’ve really defined our business around two separate and distinct propositions of immediacy and convenience – so we named these options “Shutl Now” and “Shutl Later”. At the time, we felt this was the best way of communicating our service.
We now understand that we need to make the Shutl brand itself synonymous with both speed and convenience… and much much more! At its heart, Shutl is about giving customers what they want, when they want, and in the future we expect there to be many more ways of achieving this – so it seemed to make sense to drop the ‘Shutl’ from our two options. Now when selecting “Shutl”, shoppers will choose either “Now!” or “When?”
We are particularly psyched that the unveiling of our new brand coincides with the launch of the service by Maplin – the most integrated implementation of our Shutl to date!
New website:
Our new identity is not just about our logo or how it fits within a retailer’s sales channel. It is about much more. For us it is a reflection of our ambition as both a business and a brand.
Over the last year we’ve been astounded by the levels of engagement and loyalty shown by Shutlers. This has given us the confidence to believe that we are capable of influencing consumer buying behaviour. And I don’t just mean making consumers more likely to make a purchase from an individual retailer (which is what’s happening now), but actually influencing from which retailer our customers choose to make their purchases.
Our new look site is the manifestation of our ambition. We’ve shifted focus away from retailers and partners, and instead zeroed in on shoppers.
We want shoppers to be able to discover retailers offering our service quickly and easily, so that we can start to influence where they shop. Over time we aspire to become a channel of new customer acquisition for our retail partners. This is our first baby-step in this direction but it will not be our last.
As you can probably tell, we are pretty excited about our new identity and what it means for us. On the other hand, we are very aware that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Although a whizzbang new logo and colour palate is a step in the right direction, our brand can only be built one delivery at a time.
This is going to be a very iterative process; as you may have noticed, we’re not scared of trying new things! We genuinely welcome your feedback; as much as we love to hear what we are doing right (honestly it makes our day) we also like to know when we are getting it wrong – it will bring us that much closer to where we want to be.
Just went to check out the Shutl offering on the Maplin page and it is the very first thing to jump out at you from their homepage. Far more obvious a service than on the Argos site and much more obvious an option when it comes to pay as well. Real progress!
Thanks Nick! Maplin have put a lot of work into communicating Shutl as clearly and as early as possible in their customer journey and we’re delighted with the result. We’re currently working with Argos to better communicate Shutl earlier on within their site, so hopefully you’ll see some progress later in the year.
Have a great weekend and all the best.