Your marketing, made easy.
The Ask.
Shopify, the leading e-commerce platform for small and mid-sized businesses, was struggling to maintain brand consistency from years of enforcing a "no style guides" policy. Additionally, their dotcom was being maintained by freelancers who possessed a great deal of skill but couldn't easily share institutional knowledge.
The task assigned was a two-parter: update the Marketing page (a primary touchpoint for all prospective users), and create a blueprint by which other content designers could easily do the same for other pages.
The Challenge.
How do you create a style guide for a brand that (until recently) abhorred them?
And how do you do that when you've only been with that company for a month so far?
My Solution.
Immediately, I realized that my style guide would need to be dotcom specific, departing from any other rules that existed and explaining its reasoning for doing so. By talking to other stakeholders—including design directors, product marketers, and other content writers currently working for the brand—I was able to develop a working vocabulary of “dos and don'ts” that applied specifically to our work on dotcom.
As the project evolved, I keyed in on messaging I had heard most recently from our CMO: be brutalist, but don’t be boring. In other words, say the most exciting thing about the product as clearly as you could say it—music to my ears. I put that concept in my first draft, and it turned out to be the right choice; key stakeholders had heard this axiom countless times and liked seeing it applied to our little corner of the brand. From where once there was nothing sprung forth a one-pager of ideas by which Shopify.com could be built, line by line.
It turned out to be relatively straightforward for me to apply these rules to our Marketing page, and that page helped codify a new way of working for our team: we were still part of the larger Shopify brand, but we were playing by our own house rules built off of one of the core things it stood for. What was especially fun for me was presenting this page to our CMO himself, as he recognized how his perspective on copy had shaped the final product.
The page improved web traffic, further emphasizing how a little bit of "do this, not that" can be essential for an established brand.
