From Acquisition To Experience

Lesson:

New brand identity should immediately identify key positioning.

Saul Geffen, CE of ooba, explains the motivation behind the change: “The MortgageSA brand was limiting in meaning and undifferentiated in the bond origination market – think Better Bond and Bond Choice as examples.”

Geffen said a key decision was taken to discover both a new, emotive brand name as well as the right corporate identity and brand architecture to reflect the company’s evolved offering, which now extends beyond bond origination to offer a complete homeowner solution. This includes finding a suitable home to live in (oobasearch), acquiring finance to purchase the home (oobabond), insuring the home and its contents (oobainsure), as well as having access to funds to finance the move and make it an easier and meaningful transition. This is achieved by having access to discounts of between 7,5% and 35% at national retailers and providers of home-related products and services.

ooba, as used by MortgageSA, is derived from the universally coined word über, meaning super, the ultimate, the best. A play on this word was able to convey the “best of” and link to “the ultimate homeownership experience.” Ruth Nel, group marketing manager of ooba says the correct spelling of the word über did not work as a brand because it was too literal and was already registered as a .co.za domain name at that stage. “We reviewed all versions of spelling for the word, such as ‘oober’ or ‘uba’, but none made sense, worked as well as ooba did as a consumer brand, were as strong for branding purposes or as visually appealing.” ooba’s tagline is “experts in home finance”. Nel explains that as the name is so visionary, they needed a tagline that is clear about what they do. “If people didn’t know or see any of the adverts or campaigns about the company transferring, they would still be able to know what our underlying service is. The tagline will, however, evolve over time, perhaps to the ‘ultimate homeowner experience’ or ‘live the ooba life’, but for now it remains our current and always overriding tagline,” says Nel.

The Professional Team

Andy Rice and his team from brand and communication strategists Yellowwood were involved from the outset and reviewed the brand architecture, devising a comprehensive way forward to build the brand right. Brand design house Grid Design was selected as one of the agencies to generate names that befitted the company’s vision. Nel says that Grid Design generated a name very early on (November 2005) from a total of 650 names and the process was personally overseen and presented by Nathan Reddy, the CEO. The final ooba logo design and corporate identity was created by design agency Code. Nel says that Sean Harrison, Code’s creative director, was personally involved in the process and designed the final colour and font of the logo. ooba’s corporate colour remains green as the primary colour to carry over the existing MortgageSA brand equity, but is now presented in a brighter green – noticeably funkier – arguably reflecting the company’s new energy. “The round font application lends itself best to the word ooba, given the round letters and the ‘round’ sound. The symbol device of the target is a powerful visual representation of the business offer of the 360 degree homeownership solution or full circle of services to the homeowner,” says Nel.

Cape Town’s Jupiter Drawing Room was responsible for ooba’s marketing campaign. Creative director Ross Chowles says that ooba is an entity on a development path – growing, evolving and mutating, but all the while improving. “Therefore, for both the TV ad and print campaign, we’ve used the analogy of a house, because homes also evolve over time,” he says.

Stealing ooba’s thunder

An aspect that has stolen some of the limelight from the launch of ooba is the similarity in colour and font between a Chicago, Illinois, baby furniture company also called ooba (www.ooba.com). Nel says that as her team understands it, the ooba.com name is a play on the words “ooh baby” or a baby noise/sound, given its target market. “When presented, Grid was aware of the registration of ooba.com, as the site name had been registered although the site owner was not at that point conducting any business. While the actual font of the logo was quite similar at the time the logo was presented to us, the colour was actually magenta as opposed to its current green. The colours, font, and visual representation of the current logo were chosen from many variations from two design agencies, for specific reasons and, importantly, because they looked the best, achieved the objectives, and put across the right message,” says Nel.

And so the wheel has come full circle, excuse the pun, as ooba is poised to once again change the face of the bond origination industry as we know it.