Expanding the Vastelastenbond's service - Earning the consumers' trust by putting them first.
Growing a customer base for Vastelastenbond's new service through easy to understand communication and transparent values.
Background
Vastelastenbond is a purpose-driven consumers-association founded when the utilities market went private. Their goal is, and always has been, to protect consumer rights. Providing consumers with insight into their fixed expenses and helping them understand how to lower their monthly costs. Besides assisting people in understanding and reducing their costs, Vastelastenbond’s purpose is to help consumers never experience stress or discomfort from dealing with their fixed expenses.
The management of Vastelastenbond reached out to us to help them earn the trust of their audience. They enrolled us to help them design a new subscription-based model and improve their online customer experience.
Story
In a digital landscape flooded with confusing price comparison websites often falsely stating their independence, consumers don’t know who to trust anymore. Unfounded and misleading marketing claims are causing people to question any company claiming honesty, causing the market to become more and more disrupted.
We teamed up with Vastenlastenbond’s experts to develop a strategy for tackling their biggest challenge so far. Earning the trust of their audience while simultaneously enrolling them in their new yearly subscription model. Our first priority was reshaping the brand, its message, and its communication system.
Reshaping the VLB brand
We gathered Vastelastenbond’s core-team to gain a deeper understanding of their most prominent values. Understanding what drives the company provided us with the insights we needed to translate its brand identity into clear language and a comprehensive (visual) communication system.
To strengthen the Vastenlastenbond brand’s trustworthiness, we designed the visual language to reflect the friendly, personal, and open approach of the people behind the service. Vastelastebond’s tone of voice is personal and easy to understand. Always positive, always educating, and completely honest.
The brand guide was designed to provide inspiration, best practices, and examples for tone-of-voice, interaction, language, and look & feel throughout VLB’s online and offline communication.
Brand promise
Vastelastenbond promises to help consumers never experience stress or discomfort from dealing with their fixed expenses again.
The big brother
We defined Vastelastenbond’s brand personality as the protective big brother. The brand that lets you discover the world, but always keeps an eye out. Making you feel safe and protected. Guiding you by your hand to overcome obstacles, while giving you the space to learn and grow.
Design sprint
Now confident to move forward with the new brand, we felt ready to take the next step.
Developing a new subscription-based model for Vastenlanstenbond’s services.
We knew developing this new system would not only be a significant risk but would also be a considerable investment in time and money for our client.
To negate some of the risk and validate the viability of the new model, we suggested running a Design Sprint. We put together the sprint team combining three of our own people with five experts from Vastelastenbond. In just four days, we went from defining our Sprint question to developing and user testing a functional prototype. The insights and data we gained from the Design Sprint validated the viability of our client’s new model, while also providing us with the improvements needed to steer it towards success.
