Building a future-ready and user-centered site for Brandirectory's growing suite of services

Project summary

Brand Finance partnered MintTwist to re-imagine and completely overhaul their dated and difficult-to-use Brandirectory website. Brand Finance required a modern, versatile website design underpinned by a technical solution that would provide the foundation for a growing suite of services over the following years.

The previous Brandirectory site had no e-commerce functionality and left a lot of room for UX and performance optimisation. The aim was to begin driving sales through the site, improve bounce rates and overall traffic and to better utilise the well known and established Brand Finance brand.

The technical solution proposed by our laravel web developers made use of several modern web frameworks to build a comprehensive system that controlled and ordered the vast amount of data output by Brand Finance into a bespoke CMS where it could be managed and added to. A separate front-end system then reads from that back-end CMS and presents the vast amount of data in a clear and simple way.

The advantage of this approach allowed the team to utilise different website development frameworks for different parts of the website; making each section quick and optimal for its purpose. The architecture also allows for Brand Finance to realise their plans of introducing far more to the website as the tech structure is hugely extensible and built to be easily maintained and added to.

About Brand Finance

Each year, the experts at Brand Finance utilise a wealth of experience, expertise and a comprehensive methodology to create brand value reports. These reports determine the value a company would be willing to license its brand if it did not own it.

Brand Finance calculates brand value using the Royalty Relief methodology which determines the value a company would be willing to pay to license its brand as if it did not own it. This approach involves estimating the future revenue attributable to a brand and calculating a royalty rate that would be charged for the use of the brand.

Brand Finance defines a brand as the “Trademark and associated IP including the word mark and trademark iconography”. Such an approach involves estimating the future revenue attributable to a brand and calculating a potential royalty rate that would be charged to use the brand.

Objectives

1. Work closely with Brand Finance to discover and plan the new site requirements
2. Overhaul the visual language on the front end of the website
3. Create a more modern layout that makes better use of the Brand Finance brand
4. Utilise modern technology to build a bespoke and future-proof system
5. Complete an in-depth SEO audit, ensuring that the new website improves the sites rankings
6. Ensure a strong focus on ecommerce conversions

Strategy

It was important to us that we build a site that is not only better, stronger and more resilient for visitors and potential customers, but also a site that strongly represented Brand Finance in a positive light. We worked closely with the team at Brand Finance to get a true sense not only for the customer base and their demographics, but also of Brand Finance themselves.

We kept in close contact with our client both in the planning and creative phase of the project, and throughout the technical phase. We had regular meetings to stay on track, on message and on top of the vast data Brandirectory creates and holds.

The project

The project was planned, designed and built over a period of 6 months, with regular meetings between MintTwist and Brand Finance. It involved expertise from all of our teams, with particular effort spent on front-end development and user experience design.

Brand Finance were also interested in MintTwist’s ability to bring expertise from all across the agency, including creative, technology and digital marketing. The company was eager to ensure their search engine rankings were not negatively affected by the rebuild. Because of this we worked in collaboration with Brand Finance’s team and our own marketing team to keep it in check whilst we designed, built and delivered a brand news site which is now much easier to use, makes better use of the incredible content in an engaging way and further accelerates Brandirectory’s authority.

The result

The final product is a fast and responsive site, built on cutting-edge technology with due thought and diligence paid to the user experience.

Brandirectory’s new website is a much better representation of the authority Brand Finance holds, and does a better job of growing and strengthening the brand.

As a result of the successful project, MintTwist and Brand Finance have embarked on a series of ongoing website support projects and consultancy to build upon the Brandirectory site.