Mi-Pay are a recognised leader in the cardholder-not-present payments market, with particular expertise in mitigating fraud risks for prepay mobile and international calling. For over ten years they have managed multiple-millions of top-up transactions in the mobile world – trusted as the business that takes away the risk and complexity from mobile transactions, top-ups and payments.
Within this complex and competitive world, Mi–Pay needed to get their message and brand across in a way that was simpler, clearer and offered tangible benefit to businesses, mobile operators and investors. And it was at this point that they came to SomeOne and SomeOne/Else.
Working closely with business consultancy Ellare, the core Mi–Pay team had a clear vision of where they wanted to go. We worked with them to craft, hone and simplify this vision – delivering the core foundations of brand strategy, tone, approach, a comprehensive brand world as well as an effective customer focused site.
Stuart Newstead, CEO of Ellare, says, “Mi–Pay had asked us to assess their positioning with mobile operator customers like Vodafone and Tesco Mobile. It became quickly clear that Mi–Pay were low profile and not well understood by existing and potential customers alike. What was needed was a far more engaging, consistent and all-embracing approach to their communications. SomeOne and SomeOne/Else were the ideal partners for us to bring in to create and deliver this.”
The core brand world is built around the construct of simplicity and connectivity. Using the hyphen as a connector, we’ve been able to take what were often complex processes, acronyms and services, and deliver them in simple, short and easy to understand phrases. Phrases that not only cut through the market tech-speak, but also make them appear graphically ownable to Mi–Pay. What do we mean by this? “Comprehensive indemnification, fraud prevention and zero fraud loss solutions, used to control the fraud levels on the system” becomes Risk–Free. “Sector complexity and business challenges” becomes Friction–Less, the “future possibilities of the technology” become No–Limits.
Gary Holt, Executive Creative Director, overseeing the strategic and branding project says “the brand world doesn’t stop with sector descriptive headlines. For a B2B, or even B2B2C business, whose communications to customers are often few and far between, we needed every touchpoint, every presentation, every word to work as hard for Mi–Pay as possible. And as ever, we weren’t going to rely on the logo to do all the heavy lifting. So business cards announce Nice–to meet you, financial statements are Mi–Numbers and Mi–Words, even the office eraser is Mi–Mistake…”.
Tim Sumner, lead designer on the project explains “based on this dynamic naming and copy construct, what we wanted to deliver was a simple, bold identity. That firmly placed Mi–Pay in the sector that was trusted as well as bold. Hence the choice of a bold font, simple iconography and simple messaging”.
Dave Dunlop, Creative Director at SomeOne/Else says “By using this simple brand language we were able to effectively de-clutter the myriad of offers and messages and set out a new direction for Mi–Pay that clearly and concisely communicates their business offer. Our solution honed this into a simple homepage with elevator pitch and three key benefits for both the customer and their end-customer as well ensuring they looked good on mobile devices, which is critical for modern technology businesses.”
We are delighted with the creativity and innovative simplicity that this project has delivered, and especially the holistic ‘brand world’ approach that helps us to link all the pieces together in an engaging way. I never thought that a hyphen could be so useful to a company like ours. Mi–Thanks.