M1 Finance
CASE STUDY
How M1 Finance Raised $78 Million with the help of a Brand Renovation.
M1 Finance is a highly innovative ‘finance super app” that manages all aspects of your personal finance needs allowing you to invest, spend, and borrow – all in one place. M1 eliminates the need to use a mix of brokers, money apps, and banks to manage all financial aspects – saving you time and money.
Industry:
Financial Technology
Strategy and Design Services:
Brand Strategy / Positioning
Consumer Research (qual / quant)
Copywriting
Brand Book
Visual Identity (principles / look and feel)
Website + Social Media Design Idea
Iconography Design
Brand Guidelines
THE CHALLENGE
The M1 Finance brand needed to evolve to keep pace with company growth. Having grown rapidly, the company was looking to evolve their brand identity (both strategy + design), to reflect the new range of services and vision for the future in a highly competitive marketplace.
“We tried shifting messaging ourselves but it was a lot of moving pieces rather than one cohesive brand story.”
THE SOLUTION
Redefine the vision and purpose for M1 Finance by understanding financially fluent investors and their fundamental belief that money should work smart – that every penny should work as hard as they do.
M1 partnered with Kim Jursa Brand Strategy, who brought in Anouk Schofield Brand Creative, for a Brand Renovation including Verbal and Visual Identity.
The deliverables: a new brand strategy, visual identity and prominent online presence.
“Now all our marketing touch points ladder up to the new brand identity and we have cohesion – a strong brand!”
BRAND STRATEGY / POSITIONING
Strategy began with key stakeholder, affiliate and customer interviews to identify the brands core strengths. M1 Finance customers are intelligent, financially fluent investors seeking to make every penny work as hard as they do. With these foundational insights, I facilitated a series of workshops to define the brand’s core messaging and establish consensus around the strategic vision.
What emerged from the strategy phase was a powerfully articulated brand positioned as the Smart Money Management solution.
“Kim brought a fresh perspective and a structured process. She took all our previous work and research and distilled into a cohesive strategy. Then Anouk translated the positioning into an updated brand look.”
COPY WRITING
Headline & Tag lines
The M1 Finance headlines, tag lines and main body copy were crafted to reinforce a brand that is an innovative expert – bold, brave and intelligent. Central themes around intelligence are used throughout the site, building a brand narrative that speaks authentically to confident, self-directed investors.
BRAND BOOK
Ensuring ongoing brand alignment with growing internal staff and VIP external teams was critical for M1 Finance. So, the current brand book evolved to reflect the updated positioning to include: purpose, market definition, audience, positioning, company/products reasons to believe, core services, brand essence, personality and consumer messaging.
BRAND REDESIGN
With this strongly defined positioning in place, M1 needed to visually bring to life the brand with a reimagined look and feel.
Collaborating with key stakeholders of the brand, we explored inspirational creative worlds that we could leverage to bring relevance and freshness into the category.
We developed tight expressional principles to guide the redesign, ensuring clarity in the visual creative brief.
And we defined an exciting design territory that would enable us to inject some new energy and meaning into the brand, connect with the M1 consumer and be a game changer in the Financial space.
The M1 redesign dimensionalizes the brand, sharpens the unique point of difference and creates a strong visual cohesion that extends across the entire brand ecosystem – web, app, social media, marketing materials and beyond.
The new visual identity:
· Visually brings to life the M1 Dynamic pie with a new icon - the exclusive M1 tool
· Uses a progressive new color palette that breaks out of traditional finance
· Creates momentum and energy with distinctive iconography and striking visual devices
“Anouk brought multiple ideas to the team – she dug into the competition and into our clients’ interests and turned those learnings into design options. The final brand treatment included multiple assets and examples we could immediately put to use.”
Results
Raised
$78MM from Venture Capital firms
($33MM Series B
plus $45MM Series C)
Doubled platform assets to $2B+
Grown to more
than 1/2 million investors
More highly
engaged clients
(via social media & email campaigns)
“I highly recommend Kim for any company looking for an intelligent, passionate, and experienced marketer.”
— Brian Barnes, CEO M1 Finance
“We raised an additional $78 million in venture capital funding, have more engaged clients and doubled our platform assets.”
— Cat Costa, Creative Lead M1 Finance
