Inventing a new category
Slalom Build
Brand Development
The World’s First Build as a Service Company
Slalom is a consulting firm with a strong digital pedigree. On the premise that nearly every organization is now—or will soon become—a technology company, they’ve spent the better part of a decade building an offering to help their Fortune 500 clients conceive, develop and deploy technology products and bring them to market. When they were ready to share this accomplishment with the world, they enlisted Turnstyle to help them tell the story.
Research and Strategy
With this new offering, Slalom was pushing into a new category of service that doesn’t fit cleanly into the traditional definition of “consulting”: on-demand software and technology development. We needed to first conduct research upon which to base a strategic brand recommendation. Together with our strategic partners at Stoke, we pored over existing customer research, conducted new internal interviews, and audited key competitors. Ultimately, we determined that Slalom’s best play was to develop a new subordinated umbrella brand to clearly define this new offering relative to its existing consulting business.
New Brand, New Category
By incorporating the existing name and logo into this new sister brand, we were able to attribute equity back to Slalom. The new name—Slalom Build—is suggestive of the offering, and allows for a broad range of activities in the technology design and development space. Further, since this is a relatively new and poorly understood category of service, potential clients—and indeed, Slalom itself—needed a new vocabulary to discuss the offering. From this discovery came the recommendation to create and promote an altogether new category name: “Build as a Service” (BaaS).
The Slalom Build logotype is simply an extension of the existing Slalom logo. When presented together with the core Slalom brand, there is an obvious relationship between the two logos that helps communicate the organization's structure. The real beauty of the Build identity comes through the use of the underline element that connects the two words “Slalom” and “Build.” It is the building block of a wide variety of elements including iconography, motion, background patterns and illustrations.
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