Building a brand from the ground up .

The Upside app is utilized by over 5 million users on a daily basis to earn cash back on their purchases for gas, groceries, and dining experiences. Upside collaborates with various businesses, merchants, and well-known chains in order to provide personalized offers to its users at more than 100,000 locations throughout the United States. When I joined, the company had reached a maturity stage that comes with a stable business model, but with large gaps in marketing and brand development. In other words, the brand was unfortunately undeveloped and mostly an ingredient of performance marketing efforts. One of the most exciting parts of joining the company was the incredible opportunity to build the brand from its very foundations, shaping it into something meaningful and impactful.

Visual Re-brand

Worked with logo designer Mackie Saturday to define, refine and expand brand elements across a multitude of touch points. When the final brand identity was produced, my team kicked into high gear to develop guidelines, tools, templates and deliverables to ensure a complete transition to the new visual language. This was a coordinated, massive undertaking to align consumer, B2B and external teams.

Foundational Brand Strategy Work

With the visual re-brand out of the way, we set out to lay the ground work for brand building—in other words, find and understand our audience, develop a strategic brand positioning, and ultimately establishing a brand platform for the entire organization. These efforts required consistent and proactive coordination with executive leadership, cross-functional teams, external vendors and research partners. During the course of 8 months, we brought everyone along the way, culminating with the launch of our new brand platform to inform everything we do creatively.