It’s not “eye catching” or “on trend”, but this rebranding project is one of my favourite portfolio pieces. The research I conducted revealed powerful insights which shaped every aspect of the final design.

Context

FSEAP is a national provider of employee and family assistance programs, wellness solutions and organisational consulting. They have a profound commitment to providing services that have a meaningful impact on the lives of Canadian employees and families. All proceeds go to support local community programs.

Challenge

Navigate design direction with an organisational committee which represented over 40 branches across Canada. Each branch had a unique cultural perspective and different idea of how to communicate with clients.

Process

To better understand the organization and their internal challenges I designed a brand audit. I conducted informal telephone interviews with employees, and wrote a survey that was emailed to current and former clients.

The insights gained proved to be invaluable. It was clear that language was an obstacle, by removing industry jargon from their communications we helped FSEAP craft targeted messages that were comprehensible to wider audiences.

I also discovered that the organizations name, “Family Services Employee Assistance Programs” was a barrier for prospective clients. Most people I interviewed said they were hesitant to sign up for the service because they thought it sounded like a government run program. Since an overwhelming amount of people called the organization FSEAP I recommended that they shorten the name.

The tagline “Now we’re talking”, was chosen because it spoke succinctly to the core of FSEAPs offerings (face to face counselling services) and the results from a competitive analysis showed that this was their number one differentiator.

In addition, the interviews identified that staff had difficulty managing the brand elements (this is why each branch had their own logo), I designed the logo so that even if the client “lost” their logo files all they would have to do was type FSEAP in Word and make it Trebuchet in red.