solarisBank – Brand positioning and brand driven company culture

See how Rlevance developed a brand strategy and brand-driven corporate culture for the German fintech solarisBank to help on their path of success.

Since 2015, solarisBank supports digital businesses by providing unique banking solutions. Allowing digital businesses to offer innovative financial services to their end customers with the help of solarisBank is a concept that caught on fast. Within the first 12 months, the company’s workforce expanded from a team of 10 to over 70, representing more than 20 nationalities. Being new to the market, and with a constantly growing team, solarisBank brought in Rlevance to set the direction for their brand right from the start. Fortifying solarisBank for their continuous growth, we decided to create a brand strategy that works both ways: externally to their B2B customers as value proposition, and internally on employees and company culture as brand purpose.

Deep Understanding

The lean process we designed suited the requirements of a fast-moving start-up and included key decision makers as much as possible. In-depth understanding of internal perspectives were the motivation to conduct a series of one-on-one interviews with solarisBank’s C-level and key management positions. In a second step, we looked at the external perceptions and expectations and ran interviews with solarisBank’s B2B customers. As in our perspective a good brand strategy works along the entire customer life cycle and not just in the acquisition phase, we as well explored in our interviews the customer journey and desired customer experience.

External and internal guiding principle

The research phase equipped us with a great deal of insights to lead several vision and brand workshops with senior management. Here, we matched internal strength with customer needs and expectations, and defined solarisBank’s brand strategy in a way for it to serve multiple purposes: a clear and differentiating value proposition, a guideline for all marketing related activities, and an internal motivating brand purpose, making everyone at solarisBank proud of what they do.

Communication ideas

With solarisBank’s new brand strategy as a guideline, we created a wide range of implementation ideas that would manifest it externally: the brand claim, a testimonial campaign, a content strategy, and experience ideas for partner on-boarding. For the internal brand implementation, our measures ranged from a campaign to communicate the brand’s goals and values, to experience ideas for the office and a recruitment campaign.

Brand-driven culture

Being faced with fast growth and employees from diverse backgrounds, our approach was to use the brand strategy as point of orientation for solarisBanks organizational culture. We deemed it necessary to bring all employees on board and have them interpret the brand vision for themselves in order to shape their specific contributions to customer success. We designed a workshop system that offered all employees a chance to apply the brand vision to the level of their department and function. This step ensured a solid and broad foundation for a brand-driven company culture.

Our work enabled solarisBank to condense their identity to a brand strategy with one clear proposition that sets the goal for a distinct brand image from an early stage on. Furthermore, we were able to ignite a company culture that all employees can get behind. The twofold approach – internal and external – proved to be the way to go for a young company with great growing potential.

 

Are you faced with similar corporate challenges? We would love to hear about them.

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Rlevance helped us to reflect ourselves and create a brand and a culture that is made for the future.

Marko Wenthin

Co-Founder & Board Member solarisBank

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