Brand exploration project

After being acquired by Capital One, the ShareBuilder brand needed to transition from being its own entity, to now being a fully-formed line of business: Capital One Investing.

Complicating matters, the Capital One enterprise brand was just beginning to explore their own evolution. Moving from the “house style” that had been the creative baseline for years and replacing it with something new. That meant we couldn’t simply use preexisting brand guidelines and apply them to our work — they didn’t exist yet.

As the creative lead, my team worked closely with our business and brand partners to select a spectrum of existing creative projects to revisit. We then explored how Capital One Investing’s unique personality might shine in those pieces via refreshed language and design.

The starting point

All ShareBuilder marketing was extremely transactional. Basically, not much more than a price and a “click here” button.

The next step

Eventually, when the company was acquired by Capital One, the colors changed, but the underlying thinking behind the marketing remained the same: get the offer out there as large as possible.

Flipping the script

Using engaging lifestyle imagery and aspirational copy my team emphasized humanity and advocacy, highlighting the emotional why of investing over the transactional how — positioning the brand as authentic and trustworthy — and less like a sales company.

Success

In the end, we converted close to two dozen projects over eight different rounds of creative. Iteratively building consensus across a large stakeholder group including senior enterprise brand leadership. Our new branding approach was used for all Capital One Investing marketing moving forward — and influenced the eventual look, feel and voice of Capital One itself.