Commerce without conflict

How do you express cutting edge complex technology made by a startup full of personality and, at the same time, speak effectively to Fortune 500 enterprises? Traditionally in this market, people play it safe. But Chronicled is different and they wanted to stay authentic to who they are. The strategy we created had to walk a very careful line between being fresh, accessible, and exciting while still appealing to the deeply embedded core desires of trust, power, and accessibility of their audience.

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This project was an exercise in balance. Balancing fun with serious, complex with accessible, young and experienced, and cutting edge and traditional. To give a face that represents well our communications strategy, we called upon our favourite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to give us inspiration. How can we sound both really smart and fun and maintain a serious trusted authoritative voice?

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A brand is a great brand when enough of your audience internalizes it on a gut level. Our insights and research uncovered the largest problems to solve, which audience we are designing solutions for, and  the values and personality of Chronicled's brand. From those seeds we were able to grow an effective and authentic brand strategy.

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From the start of our collaboration with Chronicled, we understood that they are cookies cut out of a different mold. In a good and tasty way. They have petting zoos in their office for birthdays and a giant T-Rex as their mascot. For a company working with global enterprises, they stand out in more ways than one and they're not afraid of honouring who they truly are. We love that.

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Based on our brand research and their team's own valuable insights, we spent months weaving a visual story into a visual identity we called the "Chronicled Universe". The challenge with extremely complex technology like enterprise blockchain is that it can easily become an overload of technical jargon. And when that happens, the story gets lost and the user isn't emotionally triggered. We experimented for weeks with different shapes, colours, and textures to arrive at a visual identity that conveys complex technical concepts in a simple, engaging, and memorable fashion.

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On the content side, we graduated from Blockchain University with this project. The content we had to work with was really complex and required a lot of studying to grasp fully. Along that process we helped Chronicled gain a clearer understanding of their product suite and how to better present it to the world. At the end of the process, we had a 120-page website content doc where Good Kind and a group of 6 people from Chronicled worked collaboratively to re-think, re-write, and re-position their product suite to be more effective and concise.

We helped Chronicled reboot their company's brand into a new chapter that reflects their vision and products in a memorable way. The new brand identity has received praise and it won some design awards. Shortly after the brand strategy launch, they closed a $16M Series A funding round.

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