Branding / Visual Design / Copywriting

RepairPal Partner Brand Kit

The RepairPal Partner Brand Kit is a packaged kit of RepairPal’s branding and marketing assets. The goal was to create an easily digestible guide to RepairPal’s visual identity, designed by Nicole Garcia, and provide our partners with the assets and instructions they need to market RepairPal accurately and successfully. RepairPal partners with automotive industry leaders, such as CarMax, USAA, GEICO, and many more to provide customers with comprehensive auto care. 

dates

Process began towards the end of Q2, 2021; shipped mid Q3, 2021

team

I was RepairPal’s first Brand Design Intern and the sole designer to work on this project. I worked closely with our Lead Designer and our Marketing team, which included two Marketing Managers and our Marketing Director. 

setting the stage

When I joined the team, RepairPal’s brand design was still in its early stages. I joined as their first Brand Design Intern, and I was tasked with developing one of their core brand assets – a partner brand kit. With brand design being in its early stages, the Design team wanted to create high-impact brand work for Marketing to leverage. As Marketing’s design needs grew, the Design team wanted to build the case for additional brand design resources through my internship and the Partner Brand Kit and demonstrate the impact of brand design work to the company.

understanding the problem

Lacking a brand kit posed several problems:

• Without a brand kit, partner branding was extremely inconsistent. This has a lot of implications when we have over 80 partners, some being large organizations with a wide reach, and many new partners being onboarded each quarter. 

• Lacking cohesive brand guidelines undermines our credibility as a brand and company and makes any marketing work that our partners do less impactful.

process

Upon starting this project I conducted a competitive analysis of other brand kits. I took a look at companies like Cash App, Hopper, HelpScout, and Coinbase to name a few. I wanted to understand what assets and documentation would be useful to include in the kit and how brand kits are typically organized and designed. Through conducting competitive analysis, I understood what elements create a successful brand kit (a variety of assets each with thorough documentation) and identified specific areas of improvement for the RepairPal brand kit (understanding our partners’ needs and how to best cater to them).

logos & colors

Packaging our logos and colors and writing documentation was a task that I was quite familiar with. RepairPal didn’t have any logo specifications for the two logos we use, our RepairPal Brand Logo and our Certified Network Logo. Though similar, each serves vastly different purposes. I specified when to use these logos as well as their proper and improper usage in the kit. As for our colors, I had creative liberty here on how I wanted to package and present them. I renamed the colors to add an extra layer of thoughtfulness and consistency to our brand and included color psychology in my documentation. 

imagery

Gathering our imagery was next, which required reviewing our library of illustrations and photography and deciding what would be most useful to a wide range of partners. I made sure to include a wide range of photography (interactions of people, shop photos, car photos, technician photos, etc.), 3d and 2d illustrations, gifs, and banner images.

product illustrations

Many of the brand kits I looked at included screenshots of the company’s key product offerings. We didn’t have any screenshots of our products that we provided to partners, which posed an issue when products such as our Fair Price Estimator and Dashboard were being advertised. Additionally, I created illustrated versions of our product screenshots to highlight their key functionalities without including specific and distracting information. 

boilerplate

Including boilerplate language in the brand kit was a direct request from our partners. We have copy scattered across our site about the company and our products but nothing succinct and comprehensive. Using this existing copy as a starting point, I wrote the boilerplate language for the company overall, our Certified Shop Network, and our Fair Price Estimator. 

marketing examples

The last step was to create a set of marketing examples that contextualizes the kit’s contents and provides partners with inspiration. Our previous set marketing examples were outdated and did not reflect RepairPal’s updated brand. As the pièce de résistance, I recreated our deck of marketing examples with updated visuals. (And in doing so I got to update RepairPal’s slide deck template, which was very outdated and did not align with any other aspects of our brand. Now, my template is used as the organization’s main corporate asset!)

putting it all together

Once the kit’s contents were finalized, thanks to the feedback and approval of the Marketing team, it was time to put it all together. We used HelpScout to create a centralized, online knowledge base for partners to access whenever they need brand assets. HelpScout is highly customizable, which led to flexibility when branding the knowledge base itself. I worked closely with our Marketing Director to achieve this. Though I experienced a steep learning curve while working with HelpScout, I was able to successfully brand our partner knowledge base, which led to the rebranding of our two other RepairPal knowledge bases on HelpScout.