Random bits and pieces of perceived marketing- and brand building wisdom, collected over a number of years in CPG and tech industries, Europe and America, operational and strategic roles. Mostly fun. Ask me anything.
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Building the eBay Brand Playbook
Maintaining strategic and executional consistency for a global brand — across a distributed and matrixed organization of 14,000+ employees — requires a single-source of truth. Most companies have brand guidelines, but many digital native brands evolve at such speeds that new guidelines may already be outdated by the time the booklet has been printed. eBay needed a central, digital experience that could grow and expand with the brand’s offering and customer experience.
Fast-paced, independent and creative environments require simplicity and functionality in execution, in order to effectively and efficiently collaborate on customer experiences. eBay’s new brand identity allowed for a lot of flexibility in execution, especially when the guidelines we’re used ‘directionally’. Building a tool for color layering and -blocking (instead of relying on rules) has helped employees not only build experiences that were more ‘on brand’, but also building them much more efficiently. Tools over rules.
The playbook includes relevant context and content to help employees understand the meaning and motivations behind each building block, not only the guidelines themselves. The content is accessible for all employees, but also whitelisted creative- and media agencies, as well as other external partners.
Both content and functionality are updated as the brand strategy and design language evolves over time. New building blocks (such as sonic identity), can easily be developed, published, communicated, and implemented. And respective assets (sonic DNA, logos, sound tracks etc.) can be made available in a DAM library.
The eBay brand playbook contained not only guidance for marketing execution, but included the entire UEX design language use by the design- and engineering groups to build product experiences. Other functions could integrate subject-matter expert guidelines, and make them available globally, across locations and teams.
CREDITS: eBay — Vic Ekwenuke, Jen Bernard, Antonio Wolffenbuttel, Hae-Seon Song, Joe Krilanovic, Charlie Wright; Agencies & Partners — Free Association, Elbow, Salesforce, Jam3
Self-Serve Brand Training
In many non-traditional environments experiencing prolonged organic growth through innovation, the role of ‘brand’ can sometimes be a bit obscure. Branding is often mistaken as a somewhat esoteric, more expensive and less measurable sub-discipline of marketing. The eBay brand training was designed to de-mystify branding and demonstrate how it can directly impact the business at eBay. It provided an effective way to create a shared understanding of who eBay is, why it exists, what it offers to consumers, and how it shows up in the world.
The training was built in a modular way, allowing for multiple audiences with varying degrees knowledge requirements, as well as easy and ongoing content updates to map the brand’s evolution. Every new hire would go through this training as a way to ground themselves in basic brand knowledge, as well as understanding the eBay brand in-depth.
The curriculum covers generic brand basics (including proof-of-concept illustrations, using other brands such as Starbucks), as well as deep, specific brand knowledge about eBay itself — including for example a detailed section on eBay’s brand strategy; or an interactive timeline of events that shaped the eBay brand since its inception in 1995.
Moast chapters of the brand training feature interactive knowledge checks to ensure key facts and insights are playfully internalized by the trainees. The training concludes in a pledge (downloadable as a screen saver), where eBay employees can customize the role they want to play in building and strengthening the eBay brand.
CREDITS: eBay — Hae-Seon Song, Jen Bernard; Agencies — Jam3