Start Your Story • A Transformational Brand Refresh and Launch Campaign

As a world-class provider of innovative writing and art instruments, uniball had always been well aware of the power that lies in doing things differently. But for a 135-year-old brand that held its position as an industry leader for decades, change doesn’t come without its challenges. To write the brand’s most exciting chapter yet, we teamed up with uniball and developed a fresh brand identity, along with a go-to-market strategy that helped introduce it to the world. Renamed as uni, we launched the brand through an end-to-end omnichannel campaign spanning content, film, media buying and more—honoring its heritage while looking forward to the future.

To create a new brand identity that resonates with consumers, we started by conducting a research study surveying over 500 primary household shoppers in the writing instrument category. This study informed the overall tone of voice, as well as the creation of hundreds of new brand assets—including a refined logo and color palette, brand guidelines, packaging and merchandising, social media channels, applications, OOH and print advertising. Turning uniball into uni, we helped create a more friendly brand, an approach that’s reflected in the optimized, revamped website. With different textures and popping colors, uni’s brand identity went from traditional to transformational—changing consumer perception while driving inspiration and fostering a stronger connection to the brands’ identity.

To create a brand that resonates with consumers today, it’s vital to understand their core needs and shifting behaviors, as well as the market trends. So before we could introduce uni to the world, our strategy team identified customer, cultural, category and company insights through both primary and syndicated research. In doing so, we found that recent world events had awakened a desire to create and take on new challenges in the target audience. With this in mind, we developed a go-to-market strategy that articulated this sentiment.

Once the new brand identity was ready and the research concluded, we developed and launched Start Your Story, an omnichannel campaign that centers on the first-person experiences of those writing their own futures. We focused on the brand’s inspiration pillar and kept an optimistic tone of voice that encouraged the audience to connect with their creative selves—raising brand awareness and driving audiences to see uni as a modern brand with a fresh new take.

To achieve maximum reach, our teams worked together to leverage the original research and created target personas, as well as allocated budget splits across media channels. This included using a testing framework with three creative variations and four measurement initiatives such as Brand Lift Studies and GWI Research, with data shown on an interactive live dashboard. In other words, we ensured the campaign was rolled out across today’s most relevant channels, according to their purpose within the brand ecosystem.