How we used Human Centered Design to build a powerful, pan-african, youth focus brand of 350k

Context

ALX had its start as an education accelerator off of ALU ( African Leadership University ) and required to update it’s brand in line with it’s new direction

ALX origins

Why the change?

Goals

Create a fresh, engaging and bold brand identity and strategy

Appeals to 18-35, young African leaders, across the entire continent

Develop content strategies for social campaigns to further build brand awareness

Create workflows that enables the creative team for ongoing evolution of brand, creative

Develop ways-of-working between Creative, Marketing, City Hub ( Nairobi, Ethiopia and Cote d’Ivoire ) and Organization Teams

How might we inspire young african leaders to lead a life of meaningful impact through our brand and business?

Approach

Old brand audit and focus groups

Empathized with the current staff and teams

Empathized

Defined key areas of focus, success

Created first range of brand assets and engaged in focus group testing

Discovered success

Developed a workflow around that

Developed content workflow

Insights

We developed a 100 slide deck to help inform the organization with their understanding of young leaders
UX / HCD approach enabled greater impact over time, as opposed to a first shot and hope.

Approach

As I began working on gathering insights, it became increasingly clear that a huge pool of data and empathizing was needed to clearly define each stakeholder’s needs and ensure that a clear direction was defined and aligned upon before we commenced. I proceeded to host various Empathizing and Interview Sessions, as well as supplement with current research into large-scale property creative systems, UX principles and consumer needs within the gaming and hospitality industries.

*Many sticky notes were used ( and recycled )

Insights

Through research we identified multiple challenges in the enviroment as alongside the internal challenges Sun International faced.

The average users attention span has reached 8.25 seconds.
The average attention span of a user scrolling on social media platforms, 0.25 seconds.
Future customers, currently aged 18-24, currently spend up to 7x more than the dwindling current market of 35-55+
Currently properties did not leverage using Social Media to attract new customers or engage with them. On property-brands still engage with traditional print media as their primary form of communication.

Results

A living, pan-African brand with a firm identity, capable to grow and scale

350k users email list

a workflow that continues to provide value a year later