SokoSQ is an AI-powered social commerce platform built for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in Africa. It offers a diverse range of powerful business tools including inventory tracking, sales analytics, and marketing automation.
The product has evolved rapidly in the past year, reaching thousands of businesses on the platform. Notwithstanding these accomplishments, research revealed that audiences are still favouring competitors due to lack of awareness about the SokoSQ product and its capabilities.
SokoSQ approached Kinetier to create a series of branded ads across multiple campaigns showcasing a variety of its best new features that would appear across all of SokoSQ's online and offline presence. It was important that the branding was consistent and dominant to stand out alongside competitor brands.
We shared initial ideas on how to increase brand awareness, recognition and consistency across these ads, and worked with the SokoSQ creative team to develop the chosen route.
The solution was to create a highly flexible system that could be used for a wide variety of content, while maintaining a strong visual consistency across a wide range of media and formats. Careful consideration was given to taking the static campaign into the digital environment through motion, in particular for social media, maintaining the product’s strong visual style but providing additional flexibility to showcase the offering.
As part of the overall identity elevation, we also created a comprehensive brand framework for SokoSQ, which included a set of custom illustrations and 3d elements to support the brand.
The biggest challenge for us was unifying the system across a wide range of scales, formats and media types. The key was to ensure consistency while providing equal visual prominence for each individual ad variation on sets of ads that could contain very different content within a single campaign. Another challenge was adapting the campaign assets for repurposing, tackled by creating a series of templates that the SokoSQ team could use confidently and consistently.
We explored a number of styles and colours for the modular approach (ranging from extreme and striking to more muted and recessive) before creating the final design solution, which keeps a clear and deliberate visual connection with the existing SokoSQ identity.
