We explore new ways of using tech in creative projects
The Polyfen Group LLC is a fully-remote, US based company parent to multiple brands in the creative and software engineering industries.
The most significant brand we operate is Polyfen. A fully-remote creative & software boutique offering design, marketing, and engineering services for US businesses.
Further information about the business can be found in our Business plan.
2.2. Industry Analysis
2.3. Target Analysis
Buyer Persona No.1 End-to-End Project
Pseudonym
Founder Frank
Occupation
Founder & CEO at Business Management Consultancy
Location
San Francisco, California
Company Size
8 employees
Brands they follow
Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Inc., Ted Talks, Ideo, Deloitte, Accenture, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur.
Bio
Frank has an Ivy League education on business, and he counts with 15+ years of experience in business. He was leading a business development team at Accenture, working on projects for Nike until, during the uncertain time of the Covid pandemic, he decided to make use of his gathered professional experience to start a venture of his own. He bootstraped his initial efforts investing money from his own pocket into his business project. He came up with a name for his company himself, he registered the webdomain of the company himself, he posted a job on Upwork to get a quick logo done by a cheap designer, and he created his business' website himself on Wix. He reached out to a few close, like-minded, experienced colleagues with whom he has worked previously on other business and offered them to be a part of the team he's leading. After a couple of months of launching his business, he closed a long-term contract for continuous consulting services for a large corporation. This allowed him to expand his team hiring an executive assistant and formalize other aspects of his business like bookkeeping so he doesn't have to take care of everything completely by himself. Now that the business has some dough and a couple of regular clients he wants to scale his operation to take in new, bigger clients to really make a difference in the income the consulting firm generates. However, as a savvy business person, he realizes that the quick logo that he got done for cheap and the Wix website he created himself do not express the level of professionalism he's hoping to communicate to potential clients.
Problem
He is the Founder & CEO of an emerging company in the Business Consulting sector but their Brand Identity doesn’t reflect the high quality of their services.
Solution
(End-to-End Project contract) Finding a reliable team of experts who can translate his vision for the business into a compelling brand identity and a website with user experience that delivers a good, professional, trustworthy impression to prospects and interests them in becoming paying clients.
How will they measure success?
Having an increase in the number of meetings scheduled with leads every month.
Buyer Persona No.2 Executive Consulting
Pseudonym
Corporate Catherine
Occupation
CMO at Fintech App
Location
Houston, Texas
Company Size
65 employees
Brands they follow
#
Bio
Catherine has a background in marketing with a strong focus on closing new clients and upselling existing ones through social media, PR, and email marketing campaigns. In previous jobs, she helped startups get out the door and make the most use of their funding to establish themselves in the market and fulfill their expected ROI. Three years ago, the head of HR of a young fintech startup reached out to her, offering the role of CMO. Since then, she succesfully put new marketing strategies into action that showed significantly positive ROI results with an exponential increase in registrations of new users. However, most of the in-house staff at the company are heavily oriented in developing new features for the product, and she realizes that the visual identity of the brand has suffered from neglect at the hand of a creative team that is strong in UX, but not in branding and visual design. The logo of the app is OK, but it's not great. The UI has inconsistencies in the use of color and typography, and the set of illustrations they use looks too generic. With the number of sign-ups and retention recently stalling, she proposed to the C-level to refresh their brand with a more eye-pleasing visual identity to make the app more attractive over its competitors and show a more promising value for its price. However, her team is not particularly strong in branding; plus, they could use a fresh set of eyes.
Problem
#
Solution
(Executive Consulting contract)
How will they measure success?
Increase in the number of monthly sign-ups and lower churn rate.
Buyer Persona No.3 Staff Augmentation
Pseudonym
Director Dave
Occupation
Managing Director at Marketing Agency
Location
Miami, Florida
Company Size
24 employees
Brands they follow
#
Bio
Dave is a self-made man. He didn't went to a top college, but he still committed himself fully to his professional career burning the midnight oil to get new clients for a marketing agency where he had a junior sales rep role. He climbed up the corporate ladder being head-hunted for better and better positions. He developed wonderful relationships with loyal clients and made himself a name in the industry. One year ago, the founder and CEO of new marketing agency he used to work with as a client offered him a steady position at the company being his right-hand man in keeping the revenue growing.
Problem
The inhouse team already has a heavy workload and the C-level wants to keep growing the revenue with new clients but they don't want to hire a bunch of new employees and have to deal with the management and budgeting risks that come with scaling the business.
Solution
(Staff Augmentation contract)
How will they measure success?
Customers commenting to accounts executives that they are very satisfied with their results and want to continue working with the Marketing Agency.
3. Brand Strategy
3.1. Keywords
Radical
Creative
Playful
Innovative
User-friendly
Clean
Distinctive
Business-oriented
3.2. Creative Concept
Where business & creativity come together
Similar to the Keywords, but more expressive and distinctive, the Creative Concept is a word or phrase that represents the desired emotional response from the target public when interacting with the Brand.
Unlike a Slogan, a Creative Concept is not necessarily developed for public use, although it can be used publicly. Its primary purpose is to be used internally as a mantra to guide the creative process when sketching a Logo, copywriting a slogan, designing an ad, or when developing any other type of Brand Communication. This ensures that all elements of the Brand will convey a consistent message.
3.3. Moodboard
The Moodboard contains a collection of images the can be associated with the industry and the lifestyle of the target audience. It helps identify different colours and shapes with the aim of narrowing down a certain direction for the look-and-feel of the brand.
3.4. Naming
Etymology
"Polyfen" is an abstraction of the term “Polyphenic trait”. A polyphenic trait is a genetic property that allows multiple observable variations on organisms of a single species.
The different morphology and color patterns on the shells of mollusks, for instance, are a polyphenic trait.
In the case of our brand, our name expresses the diversity of thought in the creative process.
Name Architecture
Legal Name:
The Polyfen Group LLC
Preferred name for use on all official business documentation.
Brand Name:
Polyfen
Preferred name alternative.
Fallback Name:
The Polyfen Group
Fallback alternative for brand touchpoints where the primary brand name is not available.
Diminutive Name:
TPG / Poly
This is how the team sometimes refers to the brand name internally.
3.5. Brand Architecture
3.6. Voice
The content expressed by our Brand must be informative and engaging, proactive in the design, marketing, business, and tech communities providing free and fully-accessible educational value.
Our Brand takes no part in conversations regarding politics, religion, or military conflicts.
The Newsletter is the holy grail of our content strategy. It allows us to focus on short-form content delivered directly to our subscribers in their inbox, and then repurpose it for Social Media.
The Tone of our content should be casual and friendly, but not funny. It should also be enthusiastic and relatable. Concice and to-the-point. Easy to read and understand.
3.8. Motto
Imagine. Build. Shine.
Our Motto distills the spirit of our Purpose and Core Values into a few concrete words.
3.9. Key Messages
Tagline
Under 30 characters
Creative & Software Boutique
Bio
Under 120 characters
Creative & software boutique empowering US businesses with design, marketing, and engineering services since 2018.
Extended Bio
Under 3 paragraphs
We're a creative and development agency founded in 2018 with a fully-remote team working for clients from the US.
We help US businesses translate their vision into digital experiences that bring in the money.
We're also heavily committed to R&D projects that help us grow and keep us at the cutting-edge in an always-changing environment.
4. Visual identity
4.1. Logo system
Symbol
The Symbol expresses Polyfen's brand in its most essential, visual form. It represents the coming together of the
(A) logical and (B) creative.
Logotype
The Logotype is made up of two parts: (1) the Symbol and (2) the Brand Name.
It must be the first choice when choosing a logo variation, provided that the canvas is rectangular and the logo
can be placed at an adequate size.
Family
4.2. Typography
Primary Selection
Biotif is the preferred typographic family for all headings, captions, and buttons.
We use Freight Text Pro for body text elements, like paragraphs, quotes, and lists.
The font files of our Primary Selection (Biotif & Freight Text Pro) are bound to usage licenses and distribution models which may not be available in all cases. If you don't have access to the fonts of our Primary Selection, then you can fallback to the Google Fonts from the Secondary Selection.
Secondary Selection
If Biotif is not available, then use Figtree for headings, captions, and buttons.
If Freight Text Pro is not available, then use Lora for body text.
Tertiary Selection
The last bastion of our typographic identity falls back to font files present universally in all operating systems. The most common use for the Tertiary Selection is in email clients, since they only support system fonts.
If the font files from the Primary or Secondary selections are not available you should fallback to Verdana.
4.3. Color scheme
Accent color
Indigo
#722FFF
hsl(259, 100%, 59%)
Indigo is the primary accent hue and must be used sparingly. It's reserved exclusively for
the logo, buttons, links, and other important information.
Sub-brands
Teal
#00C2A1
hsl(170, 100%, 38%)
Cookie dough
#BEA18F
hsl(23, 27%, 65%)
Butter scotch
#FDA900
hsl(40, 100%, 50%)
Blue
#0E8DFF
hsl(208, 100%, 53%)
Green
#0FB800
hsl(115, 100%, 36%)
Raspberry
#F64C4C
hsl(0, 90%, 63%)
4.3. Visual Language
Icons
All icons in Polyfen's touchpoints & communications should correspond to the Iconography set we've
selected for our Brand, Phospor.
Phospor's line-icons are meant only for use at large sizes accross Polyfen's Brand, while for smaller
sizes the fill-icons are preferred to ensure accessible legibility.
We're starting a new Figma design file with a UI Library of components and we'll be soon adding it here.
6.5. Changelog
We keep a centralized Changelog for development updates of all our public products and sites.
All updates are pushed to our public Slack channel changelog.
7. Content Generation
The subject matter of all content generation must be relevant, congruent with our Voice and Tone, and in touch with reality. We don't want to be r/LinkedInLunatics. We aim to publish content frequently, yes; But, never at the expense of quality.
7.1. Newsletter
The Newsletter is the holy grail of our content strategy. It allows us to focus on short-form content delivered directly to our subscribers in their inbox.
Most Blogs out there demand a lot of resources to end up with a very long, elaborate, polished post, that none or very few people read in full. Our Newsletter prioritizes an efficient content creation workflow that results in easily degistible content published frequently and consistently.
The content produced for the Newsletter is repurposed in two ways. (A) as Social Media posts in LinkedIn, and (B) kept in an online archive as a page in Polyfen's website.
The purpose of the Newsletter is not to push sales of our services blatantly. The goal is to provide our followers with valuable information about the industry.
Subject
Start with an emoji to illustrate the topic.
Keep the length under 70 characters.
Set the text in Title-Casing.
Be descriptive. Avoid click-baity subjects.
Examples:
💰 How Branding Makes you Money
🤖 You Should Have an AI Ethics Policy
🧪 How our Small Team Invests in R&D
📕 How to Write Useful Brand Guidelines
Preview Text
Engage the user with a sub-title to the subject line.
Max 150 characters.
Example
Ever wondered why Coca-Cola is worth 260 billion? How about Apple being worth 2.65 trillion?
Image
Start the email message with a cover image.
Dimensions: 1200px × 630px
Format: JPG
Example:
Body Text
Ideally 3-5 paragraphs long.
Finish the message with a link to our LinkedIn page.
Example
Ever wonder why Coca-Cola is worth 260 billion? How about Apple being worth 2.65 trillion? The price of those companies shares is a direct reflection of their ability to do good Branding.
If you were to buy 100% of shares of The Coca-Cola Company, you would be paying for all tangible assets they own (manufacturing plants, vehicles, inventory); but you would also be paying for ownership of their intangible assets, like the intellectual property of the Brand, its place in the mind of consumers, and the potential for future sales.
Investing in your Brand (name, logo, website, social media profiles) makes your business money in three ways:
1. Higher Market-Share A consumer faced with multiple buying options in a similar price range will always choose the most professional, trust-worthy-looking seller. Packaging what you offer with an eye-catching logo, a memorable brand name, and an elegant design will lead more buyers away from your competitors and towards your pocket.
2. Higher Pricing You’ve stolen customers away from the competition. Now, they’re starting to become repeat customers, and they’re even telling their friends about your business. People are willing to pay a little extra for the guaranteed quality of your products and services. It’s time to reflect that quality in your prices with a controlled increase of the profit margin.
3. Higher Company Valuation Investors are willing to pay a lot more money for stock in your business when you own a Brand with a distinctive name, a memorable logo, a well-crafted website, and a strong presence in social media. When calculating the value of a share from a company, the intellectual property of a Brand is a key component that could alone be worth millions of dollars.
Signature
Join the conversation about [EMAIL TOPIC] in our LinkedIn Page and share your thoughts.
The design of the Newsletter template is purposefully as simple and clean as possible. It relies on color and typography to tie it in with our Brand Identity. All other aspects of the design should resemble a plain text email sent to you by a colleague. We must stay away from overly complex layouts and heavy use of visuals. Our Newsletter's strength lies in producing real, valuable content, sent to you by someone you know.
7.2. Social Media
100% of our Social Media efforts are focused on LinkedIn. We repurpose the content generated for the Newsletter into LinkedIn posts with the addition of a link to the Newsletter subscription page and a PDF carousel.
