CASE STUDY

NEO4J
REBRAND

OVERVIEW

At Neo4j, I led a comprehensive brand refresh that drove a 135% increase in annual engagement and elevated our BlueOcean social engagement score from 100 to a "Best in Class" 185. My work spanned a complete overhaul of neo4j.com, the creation of dynamic live-action and explainer videos, and an enhanced digital presence. Alongside these efforts, I implemented efficient project workflows and built a high-performing design team, collaborating with both internal talent and external contractors to deliver impactful results.

SCOPE

Over my two-decade career as an art and creative director, I’ve led numerous brand refreshes, each unique in scale and complexity. At Neo4j, I undertook a comprehensive brand refresh during the global pandemic, working remotely to update the company’s identity and digital presence. The goal was to evolve the brand, aligning it with Neo4j’s leadership in the graph database industry while preserving the goodwill of its vast developer community.

CHALLENGE

The challenge was to refresh Neo4j’s brand during a time of rapid growth and market competition, all while navigating the complexities of a fully remote work environment. Neo4j’s brand had to not only reflect its global presence and market leadership but also resonate with its diverse audience—from NASA to developers uncovering groundbreaking stories like the Panama Papers. Ensuring alignment across teams, from leadership to marketing and product, added to the challenge.

APPROACH

I started by deeply understanding the company’s values, customers, and positioning through extensive internal and external research. From there, we evaluated and evolved Neo4j’s brand components, ensuring they resonated with the company’s mission and market. We involved key stakeholders in the decision-making process, narrowing down logo designs that incorporated the core theme of "connectedness." Through collaboration with various teams, we integrated the refreshed brand into the company’s digital assets and products.

IMPACT

The result was a refreshed brand identity that positioned Neo4j as the leader in the graph database space while fostering a strong emotional connection with its community. The new logo, combining wordmark and symbol, resonated with 95% of stakeholders and was well-received by the broader market. The project not only modernized Neo4j’s look but also laid the groundwork for future growth, ensuring the brand would scale with the company’s expanding influence.

STEP 1: DIG

When I started learning about the depth of Neo4j's customers – be it NASA, who sped up their mission to Mars to be two years ahead of schedule, or the ICIJ, who uncovered the Panama Papers – I began to understand the customer trust and relationships that have put the company at the forefront of graph database technology. Ask anyone who works for Neo4j, and relationships and connectedness are at the top of all of our minds.

On day one of my career at Neo4j, I began putting together a questionnaire to get a deeper sense of our messaging and brand. To understand the present, and get a sense of how the current brand provides a springboard to what is next, I went through these questions with employees across the entire organization – product, field operations, ecosystem, developer relations, corporate marketing, HR, and of course, our executive leadership. I followed up with over 30 individual conversations to understand how people felt about the current brand and messaging.

Here’s what I learned:

The graph database market is firming up rapidly, driving more adoption and competition in a way that’s very healthy for the market.
Our brand needs to reflect who Neo4j is in 2021 and help us stand apart as the leader and steward of the graph database category.
We need a brand that will grow with us as we expand geographically, widen our practitioner community, hire across all functions, and expand our partner ecosystem.

STEP 2: DEFINE

While many people refer to a brand as a logo, color scheme, imagery, tagline, or audio jingle, a brand is much larger than that. A brand is an essence, or a promise of an experience.

A strong brand promise joins together your purpose, positioning, strategy, people, and customers, enabling you to deliver a brand that's differentiating while also fostering an emotional connection.

So we started evaluating existing brand model components – vision, mission, promise, and values – against research findings. When necessary, we evolved elements or created entirely new elements. We performed a thorough market review to ensure clear differentiation in the marketplace, and studied the factors that make B2B tech brands iconic.

Collectively, we concluded that we should evolve our existing brand to conduct a brand refresh, and not make it a full-on rebrand. Neo4j has been embraced by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide who are doing amazing things with graphs and publicly sharing their successes. We want to preserve that goodwill and bring the massive Neo4j community along with us as the graph journey gets even more exciting.

STEP 3: DO

For me, as a creative, the next phase was by far the most exciting one. We set about exploring the brand’s look-and-feel, its visual expression and tone. We began defining how the brand architecture works across all communications.

We designed the first drafts to be a good mix between logos and symbols. I lean towards wordmarks over symbols, because it leaves a lot open for interpretation, especially if someone doesn't know the company. However, it became clear: We have to keep an open mind. We certainly wanted to incorporate "connectedness" – a crucial part of our DNA – in either an icon or symbol.

On our first review, I invited a wide variety of stakeholders, each representing a pivotal part of our organization. Together, we narrowed down the options from 10 to four for the next iteration, with a clear indication we were leaning toward two distinct directions.

In the next round, we added a hybrid option, a wordmark with nodes symbolizing connectedness integrated with the first character. This proved to be the right choice: 95% of the stakeholders gravitated toward this version that would become Neo4j’s new logo.

STEP 4: DO

We had a clear direction on what path to take. We once again went to work, dissecting every bit of the logo – its spacing, kerning, and shapes. We added custom touches and redesigned some of the characters from scratch. In comparison to the old logo, the new one features no separate icon (icon and wordmark are combined). The nodes stand for relationships, connectedness, they point forward, towards a promising future. Blue stands for trust, dependability and strength. It's clean, simple and readable.

At this point, we finalized concept approval and with help of the UI/UX Team, built out the entire brand architecture to account for Neo4j products, including Neo4j Aura, Neo4j Bloom, Neo4j Desktop, and more. We also started building our content assets, including templates for our white papers, product briefs, presentations, and social media.