With 21,000 employees and a global presence, India-based Mindtree can compete against the larger tech consulting firms and handle the most complex digital and IT engagements. But its marketing materials lacked clarity, consistency, and differentiation. To help it stand out and take its business to the next level, Mindtree called on Thinkso to evolve its existing branding into something more ownable. Working closely with the CMO and marketing leads, we developed a refreshed brand identity, deeper visual toolkit, and sharper messaging. The new creative system positioned Mindtree at the forefront of digital innovation, emphasizing its agility, technical expertise, and special culture in an industry where the human touch is just as important as the technology solutions.
BACKGROUND
After celebrating 20 years and hitting $1 billion in revenue, Mindtree knew it was time to elevate their brand. The India-based tech company often competed against large “Tier 1” consultancies, but the CMO was confident that their story set them apart from the competition. The company was ”born digital,” just the right size, and had a great track record and special culture. But the brand identity established six years prior was limiting. Marketing materials either looked too much alike (because the visual toolkit was shallow) or they were all over the place (because people went rogue). Similarly, their editorial lacked clear, consistent messaging around the personal and technical aspects of their services. Mindtree needed a brand and message that would position it at the forefront of digital innovation, and help it stand out in an industry where everyone looked the same.
“Thinkso’s ability to grasp the core of our brand and apply their expertise to create a fresh look and deeper impact was a game changer.” Paul Gottsegen, CMO, Mindtree
APPROACH
Thinkso set out auditing and analyzing Mindtree’s brand to figure out where to inject more personality and ownability in its visuals and voice. Our strategy was to infuse their brand with more energy, consistency, and clarity — and to give their in-house marketing teams more tools to work with that better communicated the company’s culture and innovation.
We started by expanding the visual toolkit, creating graphic assets and a custom photo library that made the brand identity distinctly Mindtree. This included establishing a warmer photographic style to bring more humanity to their tech services, as well as designing signature graphic elements that represented the “magic” Mindtree brought to its work with clients. This made their branding not only distinctly ownable, but also quite different from everything else in the competitive marketplace.
We also developed a deeper messaging strategy and gave them a more conversational editorial voice — both to help clients better understand their offering as well as start to build the client-vendor relationship. Their sales collateral and thought leadership was too internally focused and written from an internal point of view rather than providing information that would resonate with and be understood by external audiences. So we restructured messages to be more externally compelling, and created a warmer, more accessible, human voice to emphasize the interprofessional aspect of their work and balance out the technical aspect.
Finally, we implemented these changes by adding variety and consistency in Mindtree’s materials. They had been focusing on quantity over quality, which left their small number of strong sales pieces buried among a lot of mediocre collateral. Using the refreshed visual and verbal cues, we developed a solid set of core, corporate-level sales materials — a printed brochure and sales deck — that surfaced their value proposition at a company level and established prototypes for the service-level materials. We then set about developing materials for the service-level business groups, tackling three areas at a time.
RESULT
The evolved brand identity has not only elevated Mindtree’s image and helped it better compete against larger, more established brands — it also reenergized the company internally. With a more distinctive, ownable persona, Mindtree could now captivate clients with their unique story and distinguish their service from an otherwise sea of technological sameness. It also gave their marketing team the opportunity to reign in all the rogue materials by providing everyone with a richer toolkit to work with — and an excuse to retrain everyone on the importance of understanding, upholding, and championing their brand.
We created the Mindtree Flywheel as a central graphic for the sales materials. It does double duty, reflecting the integration of the company’s services while also giving the sales teams a powerful metaphor to use with clients: When technology infrastructure is properly set up and deployed, it becomes a self-fueling engine for digital innovation. This is what Mindtree delivers.
We also developed a library of custom-drawn iconography, and detailed guidelines for expanding it in-house. In a sector fraught with clipart, high quality, consistent icons helps Mindtree punch above its weight.
The company brochure, “Your future—ahead of schedule,” underscores Mindtree’s role as both an innovator within technology services and an empathetic partner in helping clients achieve their digital transformation goals. This piece provided the company’s leadership with a much-needed showpiece that tells the entirety of the Mindtree story in a sophisticated package.
We wrote and designed a new PowerPoint sales deck to bring clarity and vibrance to Mindtree’s overarching value proposition. The high-impact slides and accompanying sales script creates a presentation that gives audiences the proper context without putting them to sleep. These static slides are accompanied by customizable templates so that sales and product teams can add more client-specific content on a meeting-by-meeting basis. The result is an efficient way to bring more efficacy and consistency to a deck used by many different professionals across the global firm.
We also created a brand book that’s accessible to all Mindtree employees. It explains what the brand stands for, how a consistent and compelling brand sets employees up for success in whatever role they are in, and how non-designers and non-marketers can use and protect the brand identity.
To differentiate Mindtree in a marketplace crammed with stock photos of computer code, grids, and fiber optics, we conducted a global photoshoot of the company’s actual employees. Actors and extras stood in to represent Mindtree’s clients and their end-user customers. The result is a photo library of over 100 images (and thousands more to mine down the road) that Mindtree and its creative partners can use across materials.