Branding: System and Strategy – Mangahigh
Overview
Mangahigh is a Maths Game-Based Edtech with products used by more than 5.000 schools and education departments all around the world. Based in London, UK and currently owned by the German publishing firm Westermann Gruppe.
I managed and directed the evolution of Mangahigh’s brand while at the same time producing, designing and making all kinds of different digital and printed assets and deliverables that have been used throughout the world, reducing production times by 90% and increasing brand awareness and adoption.
This is just a summary of my work for Mangahigh, specifically doing branding management, branding strategy and design production – but not inclusive of my UX/UI and Product Design work which will be included in further projects.
JSON Lottie animations of Blue Duck and its students
Branding System 2021-2023
Mangahigh Styleguide 2021
Styleguide for both print and digital products and deliverables.
Mangahigh Office
Designing the office was a pleasure
The Challenge: Inconsistency and Guideline adoption
Mangahigh’s branding architecture
The system presents a very diverse and conflicting design system infrastucture
Mangahigh has gone through multiple branding transitions with an ambitious system of products:
- A platform / app to track students’ performance and assign activities to students, which are all aligned to the specific curricula of each country, region and district.
- A quiz engine called Prodigi, presented in three alternatives: ProdigiX, Prodigi3 and ProdigiJr. Each of these subproducts are aimed at specific age groups.
- A maths games library of more than 20 games, each with their own theme and designed to teach specific maths subjects.
Multiple different artists and designers worked in the past with little communication between them, which produced the following issues:
- Inconsistency: Several inconsistencies between products leads to low perceived value.
- Difficulty in internal communication and collaboration.
- Difficulty to work with other companies.
Inconsistency and Slow Adoption
Some legacy aspects of the products created difficulties to adopt branding styleguides.
2021 Branding Audit
Problem Definition
During the period between 2018-2020, the branding strategy focused on developing and establishing solid branding foundations to define the identity of Mangahigh and improve its positioning in the edtech market.
The first step was to define branding core components, such as visual identity, logo, mascots, supporting branding elements and a consistent design system throughout both digital and printed deliverables.
The next focus would be generating localised versions with modifications made especifically for each region Mangahigh works in.
Due to the changes generated by the pandemic, a revision of the branding strategy was suggested.
The Mangahigh branding design system currently in use both by sales and marketing material is considered the most adapted and thorough design system available at the moment.
Despite this, the brand is considered inconsistent due to slow adoption of branding guidelines by our products.
The company wants to extend the adoption of the guidelines as much as possible, specifically throughout its digital products with the objective of improving consistency.
Scope of the Branding Project
The 2021 project involved reviewing the guideline implementation throughout the complete structure of products and touchpoints with users and clients.
Possible Causes
Planning
- Misaligned internal stakeholders understanding of Mangahigh’s branding positioning and branding awareness.
- Unclear and misaligned branding concept
Communication
- Apparent need for a more thorough branding styleguide or lack of training/communication techniques for better usage of current one.
- Top-down decision to impede production of assets/deliverables that work in different direction to branding strategy / stray too far away.
Implementation
- Technical issues: stakeholders training, development technologies, design resources.
- Incomplete and inefficient design systems.
- Complexity of current branding architecture: Complexity of design system architecture.
- Handoff process / technical implementation in development.
Evaluation
- Lack of regular / scheduled evaluation of Branding Strategy.
- Lack of regular / scheduled evaluation of Design Systems.
- Lack of regular / scheduled evaluation of process and communication.
Effects
- Negatively affects stakeholder, customer and user experience.
- Negative effects on perceived value, sales and retention
difficulting implementation and growth. - Increased production cost.
Increase in production times.
Evolution of Blue Duck (2010-2023)
From a simple illustration, to a ready to animate simplified character
Strategy: Goals and Objectives
Goals
1- Optimize current Branding Strategy and Design Systems, and extend their adoption throghout all touch points, with emphasis on Products – Website (Logged Out), Mangahigh App (Platform), Quizzes (Prodigi – Prodigi JR).
2- Plan out next stages for growth. Possibility of change/refreshment of Branding Strategy.
Extension throughout further touch points.
Three strategies were defined to address the issue. The following was the selected option:
Strategy 1 – Holistic Parallel Approach
A – Research and Evaluation: Evaluate current branding strategy and design systems to help decide wether it’s time to refine, redefine or fully redesign Branding Strategy and Design Systems according to evaluation results
B – Alignment: Align design team in Branding Design system implementation and Apply current Branding Design System through defined scopes and scheduled phases of extension.
C – Prepare for growth: Evaluate actions taken during the process and implement modifications according to Branding Strategy decision.
Objective A and B are critical for this step.
Evolution of the Mangahigh Logo (2010-2019)
The last redesign involved fixing technical issues within the last logo and including the Westermann logo as for the company acquisition.
A- Research and Evaluation
Two surveys were designed and ran with nearly 100 stakeholders from our English speaking regions:
UK, US, AU, Canada and NZ.
Metrics
Brand Experience
Customer Satisfaction
NPS- Net Promoter Score
Perceptual Brand Awareness
Top of mind awareness
Brand recognition
Associations
Emotive Associations
Branding Survey
Results of internal and external survey with more than a hundred participating stakeholders.
Insights from Survey
Most metrics showed positive results, specially as the brand seemed to be cherished and remembered by our users and customers.
This means that a rebranding was not wise at the current moment, and instead, achieving more consistency and adoption of guidelines
was still of importance.
It was to note that most of our game characters were not recognised, as well as our logo being confused for some of our competitors.
The most recognised assets were subtle but important:
- Sound branding and jingle
- Ornament: a geometric pattern present in most marketing deliverables
- Characters
Mangahigh Characters Drafts, Evolution and Redesign (2010-2023)
Our top recognised branding characters according to the research: Megan, Mingo, Ms. Maggie, Mr. Miguel and Lexy the Robot.
Mangahigh Sound Evolution
I composed our first brand sound by using Japanese shamisen sounds blended with a medieval lyre to represent the mixture of Japanese and British culture.
According to the marketing survey, the Mangahigh Sound was one of our most succesful and easy to recognise assets.
Report: Strategy Implementation and Schedule - Phase A
The project was split into different phases, organised and scheduled:
Phase A – Quick Wins / No Risk
- Reduced impact to CX/UX FLOW, only potentially improving the overall experience by improving Consistency
- Decisions that help make a sustainable and adaptable design systems.
Reduce Complexity
In what was can the current design systems be simplified?
What can we get rid of? What needs to stay?
Sustainability
Are the decisions sustainable?
Are the decisions aligned to Technical constraints? Available resources, potential production times.
Design elements
No more than three core elements to be decided in consensus. The process could become iterative, covering main core elements until reaching stabilised design systems.
Main Stakeholders
Marketing, Product, Design
Conference & Events, Merchandising, Brochures and Leaflets
Mangahigh has taken part in dozens of events throughout the world, such as BETT, the most importand EdTech event in the UK.
Report: Strategy Implementation and Schedule - Phase B
Phase B – Prepare for Growth
Once a decision is made with regards to refining, redefining or fully redesigning the Branding Strategy, it will be necessary to:
- Define Branding concept
- Define Stakeholder Personas
- Define CX Journey
- Define Branding Storyboard
- Produce changes
Plan further extension to other touchpoints:
- Localisation
- Management
Scheduled Maintenance
- Of Branding Strategy: evaluation, adaptation
- Of Design Systems
- Of communication
Brand History: 2010-2020
Branding Styleguide 2018-2020
The first complete branding styleguide for Mangahigh
Video compilation
Videos of product releases and yearly overviews.
Before 2018
Before 2018, Mangahigh only counted with design guidelines produced by the UX team.
These didn’t work as a branding styleguide:
Specific to digital products, mostly worked as a product spec, and disregarded many aspects of the brand that were later recovered and rediscovered:
- Technical issues in Logo: spacing, negative space, kerning. No guidelines for use or incorrect usage
- No guidelines for Print
- Branding characters were discarded
- Colour palette: based on pastel cold colours
- No typographic guidelines: only one family was chosen for all branding, which made it poor in contrast and identity.
During my freelance days, I was contacted by the UX designer to rework the website and provide new branding characters in the flat design style the company decided to adopt.
Thankfully, since my freelance days I had already begun applying some basic branding concepts in previous for Mangahigh’s marketing material that I continued implementing and working on. It was important in this transition to save and bring back branding elements that had been part of the identity since its early days.
Guidelines 2015
Until the 2018 branding styleguide, the company only counted with scattered guidelines for products and there was no one source of truth for Design.
Evolution of Mangahigh’s Website
The website went through many different iterations until reaching a more stable design.
Before 2015
Mangahigh started with a focus on Japanese manga style characters with the objective of appealing to children during the late 2000s.
That being the main concept, the connotations of anime during that time in the western world transitioned to acquire controversial overtones and were slowly being left behind by the company as it wasn’t suiting their identity anymore.
From Japanese manga characters, the brand transitioned to another trend of the day in EdTech companies, which was using the concept of the ‘Math’s Ninja’.
This also proved to be a problem once a competitor actually decided to make that concept part of their main strategy, and had to be left behind again.
It is during 2015 that a switch in strategy happens in an attempt to rebrand and move towards a more Corporate Memphis/flat design style, with little to no reference to Japanese culture – But Manga still remained in the company’s name.
In 2018, with a new marketing and design team, it was decided to pick back all the elements of the brand that gave it it’s identity and reembrace manga characters reimagined for the time and focusing on softening all the negative connotations of style.
Each of these ‘eras’ had me working in multiple marketing campaigns of all kinds, specially Mangahigh’s main campaigns called Competitions, where children around the world would compete playing maths games and earn certificates, medals and trophies of all kinds.
Competition Videos
Competition ads for different regions and holidays. We ran competitions in collaboration with organisations
like Adobe, COBIS and NESTA among others from around the world.
Evolution of Competitions
I designed possibly more than 50 of these competitions which included videos, posters, landing pages, social media images, infographics, medals, trophies, merchandising and more.
Designs evolved to have a stronger concept and defined in a way that could be streamlined more efficiently, reducing production times by 90%.
