A brand refresh for the next decade without losing the 193,000+ member community
BRAND REFRESH • BRAND STRATEGY • VISUAL IDENTITY • ACCESSIBLE DESIGN • MESSAGING STRATEGY
The Disability Digest came to us for a brand refresh, but the real brief was harder than coming up with a new look. They'd guided people through the US disability benefits system since 2006, and more than 193,000 members trusted them to. We rebranded them from the ground up, creating an accessible brand identity, validated by the community it serves and built to hold up for the next decade.
FOR
BY
Salla Västilä
Lead Strategist, Brand Identity, Strategy and Positioning, Visual Brand Identity (logo client’s own)
Aliisa Västilä
Brand Strategy, Market Research, Tone of Voice, Copywriting, Taglines
Natalie Gustafsson
Market Research, Audience Strategy,
Social Media Voice
Apex Pro’s new brand turns uncertainty into strategy and makes golf feel personal, progressive, and proudly your own.
Twenty years of trust, outdated brand identity.
The Disability Digest has helped over 193,000+ US-based members to get, keep and maximise their disability benefits for over two decades. With no system holding the scattered, undocumented brand identity together, the brand had aged while the organisation grew around it.
As the team expanded, that gap started to cost them. Without a shared brand language, different people described and visualised the same brand in different ways. Brand also leant heavily on its founder's voice, building dependency on the founder and risking organisation’s long-term survival the day founder steps back.
There was also an audience constraint most rebrands would have ignored. The Disability Digest's community is older (the main audience sits between 55 and 64) and includes many people with disabilities and genuine accessibility needs. A rebrand chasing “fresh” at the expense of legibility, contrast, or familiarity would have alienated the exact people the brand exists to serve.
Community-driven brand refresh.
We profiled the community through their own channels and across the wider space, then tested both the strategic direction and the visual direction before anything was set in stone. Our empathy-mapping and psychological frameworks did the heavy lifting mapping what this audience needs before it will trust a service and a community like the Disability Digest’s.
From there we rebuilt every part of the brand from positioning and strategy to messaging and taglines, and the entire visual brand identity. All documented in a brand playbook so the whole team now communicates as one. Accessibility was built in the brand identity from the beginning.
We also designed and validated the brand’s main landing page using heatmaps, surveying and tracked user journeys, consolidated the blog onto a single domain, and handed over the practical brand collateral a growing team actually daily.
A brand refresh the whole team can use.
The Disability Digest now has a brand that matches its two decades of credibility: coherent, current, and no longer reliant on its founder to carry the voice. The whole team works from one system.
We didn't just launch the new identity and hope it landed. We validated it with the core community afterwards, and it did. Members rated the new look and design 4.43 out of 5, ease of navigation 4.27, and their likelihood of returning 4.63 — strong marks from an audience that, by nature, is cautious and slow to trust. On the technical side, consolidating the blog resolved the self-cannibalisation problem that had been splitting their search authority, and the site's domain MOZ rating has since climbed from 0 to 22.
Client feedback.
[Quote 1 — CEO / Founder. Best angle: the longevity and founder-independence outcome — a brand that now stands on its own and is set up for the next decade, and what the process felt like. Placeholder — do not publish as-is.]
— [Name], Founder & CEO, The Disability Digest
[Quote 2 — CMO. Best angle: team alignment and consistency — everyone now working from one system and one language — plus the rigour of the audience-validated approach. Placeholder — do not publish as-is.]
— [Name], CMO, The Disability Digest
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