Insight Partners
Strategy, Branding,
UX/UI, Web Development

Insight Partners is a world leader in its field. The partners, who teach through the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, built their reputation as conflict management consultants. After many successful years in business, they decided to reposition from conflict management specialist to boutique leadership advisory firm. 

Context

The repositioning allows them to use their negotiation and mediation expertise to create environments where individuals can thrive, from top executive teams to underprivileged communities. Vicine came in to help with a strategic rebrand, and to craft the websites and all the new design collaterals for the firm.

Strategy

First, each partner, additional stakeholders and workshop participants were interviewed, and a deep competitor analysis was conducted. Through this process, it became clear that what really set Insight Partners apart, besides its world-class credentials and expertise, is the ability of the partners to lead experiences that bring “magic” into a room, and that are described by many customers as a “turning point” and as “truly unforgettable”. The brand needed to combine the credentials with the profound impact of the experience. This led to positioning Insight Partners as an experience brand.

Experience brands are brands that have experiences at their core. These are traditionally brands such as airlines, restaurants, hotels or shows. This means that every single customer touchpoint is treated as a ritual and intentionally crafted to provoke an emotional response and trigger positive memories. This is a real shift because it means considering the experience itself – and every touchpoint related to it – as key to the success of the company. Such a shift helps focus on the importance of the rituals, using design as a tool to make them truly unforgettable.

Branding

Rebranding Insight Partners also meant identifying the right brand architecture to include Insight Collaborative, the brand’s non-profit arm. The two needed to feel connected, but simultaneously independent. We achieved this affiliation by crafting two distinct colour palettes for the two brands while using the same typeface and mark for their logos. The brand’s original logo was a compass, positioning the company as a guiding force to its customers. While keeping the original concept, we created a new dynamic symbol made of three distinct layered shapes, conveying an enhanced sense of depth.

Photography became a key tool in bringing the experience brand to life. Partnering with photographer Maeve McWhinney, we crafted two photography styles (one almost black and white with very low saturation, one in pastel colours), to tell the story of the partners and of the experience of working with them in a more human and intimate way.

Websites

During the User Experience phase, one of the biggest challenges we identified was crafting the two sites so that they told independent stories but they were also interconnected. We achieved this by referencing the two websites in several areas of the respective navigations. The websites were conceived as an enabler of the experience and the partners’ personality. The deeper users go in the websites, the more they discover about the partners. 
Web references: Insight Partners and Insight Collaborative.