Zopa Brand Redesign Case Study

The Zopa Memo To:Gemma Newton

• Situation

    Although Zopa has been UK’s leading technology-enabled peer-to-peer lending service and has earned a good reputation as the “Most Trusted Personal Loan Provider”, it still needs a strong and distinct brand identity to increase its customer base and make its brand a household name. Facing the situation that the senior management envisioned Zopa for dramatic growth, you are thinking of changing the brand image and redesigning the brand.

• Recommendation

To build a strong brand identity and differentiate Zopa from other competitors, you should redesign the brand logo, color scheme and tagline.

To make the brand image simple, streamlined while staying true to its heritage, the logo style can still be ‘Emblems’ as the old one, but with a blue parallelogram as contour and background. The brand name ‘ZOPA’ is green and is located on the parallelogram. The four letters of the brand name should be conspicuously and clearly shown. The first letter ‘Z’ is bigger so it’s easier for customers to recognize and memorize the brand. The new logo symbolizes that with the support of the company, the customers can make transactions and enjoy Zopa’s services freely and efficiently. The combination of green and blue is the color scheme of the brand. And the tagline placed with the logo can be ‘Your financial expert’, which captures Zopa’s brand essence, personality, and positioning. [pic 1]

• Rationale

The goal of the brand redesign is to reflect a stronger brand identity. According to the Brand Identity Prism, the brand essence of Zopa is ‘technology, transparency and trust’. The redesigned logo actually shows Zopa’s physique to be younger and more authoritative: the parallelogram shape symbolizes a money bill and efficiency, and blue represents trust, honesty, authority, security, logic and intelligence, which aligns with Zopa’s brand identity as an innovative and efficient lender. Green, the color of the brand name, means youthfulness and refreshment, which represents Zopa’s customer segment and the confidence of this company. Thus, the new logo combines the features of the customers and Zopa. Zopa’s brand personality reflects creator, explorer and also caregiver, because it innovates to deliver exceptional customer experience with technology and data. The new color scheme matches these brand archetypes.

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