William Tyree: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Brand Intelligence podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands. I’m William Tyree and today we’ll speak with Sam Brown about Affirm’s recent move to create a brand platform and revamp the company’s brand identity. This update secured a Brandie Award for “Best Rebrand or Brand Update” in the FinTech category.

So welcome Sam, Creative Director at Affirm.

Sam Brown: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

William Tyree: It’s so great to meet you. As we talked about before the show started, I’m a huge fan. I absolutely love the work that you’re doing over there and so it’s a real pleasure for me. Before we get started, we like to ask all of our guests to give us a theme song.

So if you were walking out on stage today to give a keynote address, what would that song be and why?

Sam Brown: I can’t go past a song called Home by Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros. The reason being, it just brings a smile to my face every time I hear it. It reminds me of the most important thing in life, which is that [00:01:00] of a successful relationship. In this instance, now, while this song is about a romantic couple in particular. Solid relationships and how they make you feel relate to work lives as well. So when you get to build enduring relationships with work colleagues, it makes careers much more fulfilling.

William Tyree: I absolutely love that pick. My daughter will tell you that I have played that song relentlessly. One of the things we like to do together is go fishing, and so whenever we’re going in the mountains, we’ve got this fishing playlist and that’s the very first song in the playlist because it’s ironic we’re going away from home yet, when for us, we’re connecting in the outdoors together. That’s just an amazing thing. I absolutely love it.

Sam Brown: That is awesome. That’s going to set the tone for the whole fishing trip. I love that. 

William Tyree: It absolutely does. Cool. Let’s talk a little bit about Affirm for those who don’t know Affirm. I’d love just to hear your own words. What does Affirm do? Who does it help? 

Sam Brown: Sure, So Affirm is a payment network for both [00:02:00] consumers and merchants. Affirms’s mission is to deliver honest financial products that improve lives. So consumers can use Affirm to take control of their finances and merchants can use Affirm to drive business growth.

There are a couple of key things that set Affirm apart. The first being honesty and transparency. People find this hard to believe, but Affirm will never charge consumers late or hidden fees ever. So from the moment someone checks out, we show consumers exactly what they’re going to pay up front.

The second thing that makes us stand out is that Affirm offers a variety of repayment plans and term options. So it’s a very flexible payment network. Consumers can choose what works best for them, and we’re able to support a wider range of transactions that merchants offer as well. Ultimately Affirm believes everyone should have the chance to realize the power of their money. So every product Affirm creates is here to help people live life on their terms.

William Tyree: That’s great. You had me at no [00:03:00] hidden fees.

Sam Brown: Yes. I have many people at no hidden fees.

William Tyree: That’s terrific. Listen, you do amazing work over there. You won a Brandie award, before we dig deeper into that campaign, can you tell us a little bit about how you feel Affirm was viewed in the market before you did this latest brand refresh?

Sam Brown: Yeah, of course. Affirm was founded in 2012. So since then, we’ve actually evolved a lot during that time. As leaders in the pay of a time space, we knew that we needed a brand that felt relatable and meaningful to our consumers and something that fits into their daily lives, and we wanted people to see themselves in Affirm and recognize the depth of financial experience and expertise that we bring to the table. And so that’s what we set out to build. Prior to the brand refresh, Affirm was seen at checkout, but it wasn’t [00:04:00] necessarily well known.

William Tyree: When we think about how well known a brand is, what are some of the just basic things that your team looks at to determine that? 

Sam Brown: One of the things we look at as aided awareness and unaided awareness with Affirm, we’re very fortunate to work with hundreds of thousands of merchants. And so many consumers will see our logo at the point of checkout prior to the brand refresh. And that’s probably where they only saw us. They recognize the logo. They know it’s a payment platform and they can utilize us. What they didn’t really know before the brand refresh was. How we could really benefit their lives from an emotive point of view or how we could fit into their lives. And that’s why a brand refresh was so integral. 

William Tyree: One thing that stood out to me about the work that you did and that your team did was, assets tailored to all of these own platforms and merchant partner [00:05:00] platforms. Can you tell us just a little bit more about how you approach the creative process for that? And whether consumer insights or marketing research played a part in shaping that?

Sam Brown: Yes. As I mentioned, we are a payment solution and we partner with hundreds, literally hundreds of thousands of merchants. So our brand Refresh not only had to represent our company, we also had to ensure it worked in partnership with many other very well-known brands, which is no easy feat to do.

So before we even started looking at our visual identity, there are a number of strategic workshops that took place with Brian Martin, our Director of Brand here. A great deal of work went into aligning everyone on our brands enduring belief, which is realizing the power of your money. From there, we explored how to communicate that strategic thinking into a consumer friendly way.

So our internal brand creative team here at Affirm, [00:06:00] who’s led by our two Associate Creative Directors, Bethany Valoe and for Art Direction and Megan Mooney for copy. They went through an extremely iterative process, both the tone of voice and visual identity.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between William Tyree and Sam Brown…