Case study
A full-spectrum brand pivot for a prop-tech startup with $100mm in venture funding
Compared with companies of a similar size, Turnkey's visual presence didn't capture the elevated experience and service that TurnKey could provide both guests and owners. A complexity of the redesign was that guests and owners had completely different service experiences and expectations. Luckily both came from the same customer segment so aspects of an elevated brand could work across customer types.
CompanyTurnKey Vacation RentalsYear2019RoleLead design team (internal and contract), presented to board of directors, worked with content strategists. As an individual contributor: competitive research and analysis, managed design contractor, web design, brochure/print design, logo design, video
Project goals
In terms of scope and timeframe, the rebrand was the largest project I completed in my 3 years working at TurnKey, and one that I'm extremely proud of. The goal was to be the #1 tech-enabled property management solution out in the marketplace. We knew we couldn't beat industry darling Vacasa, with their great name and massive scale. We did think that we could own the market for affluent, value-seeking property owners and we set about to accomplish that.
Goal
Across all touchpoints
The re-branding effort needed to show up across customer touch points, including slide decks, excel docs and photography
Goal
Express TurnKey's technology-enabled property management offering
The branding had to express TurnKey's offering of property management backed up by techology
Goal
Connect with the mass affluent who owned vacation homes
The re-brand had to set TurnKey up for success, landing the company in the right segment of the marketplace
A look at the new brand
The ‘before’ design of the above website was broadly representative of the visual branding when I joined the company.
Market segmentation
Focus on 'mass affluent' consumers
This segment was broadly defined as having disposable income not just to travel for vacation, but also to spend money on experiences, upgraded amenities, and more upscale properties.
The project plan started by defining our values, positioning, and history. Once we had alignment on the core brand attributes, we would decide on key outcomes. We would conduct research to validate our assumptions and get a sense of visual communication within the travel industry. With the brand structure in place and research complete, we could move forward with a visual update confident in our approach.
Refining values, positioning and messaging
Getting alignment on these items helped the team start with why and work from the inside out. In a redesign effort, values and other stances are like the vertical layout grid in a website design - they create an unseen structure that helps guide the design effort to success.
Competitive research
Connection with ideal customers, differentiation from competitors
We decided on three types of research to help answer a key question. How to build an elevated brand that targets the 'mass affluent' consumer segment while differentiating TurnKey from a wide spectrum of Competitors. We decided on a few methodologies to help us answer these questions: a competitive analysis would give us an overview of visual communication in the industry; a heuristic analysis focused on color would give further visual information about the industry; and a survey would give us a broad look at the aspects of vacation rentals that our ideal customer valued.
Visual competitive analysis
This answered the differentiation question - knowing the range of visual communication styles in the industry helped us know where we could find opportunities to stand out.
An analysis of color usage across the travel industry
Brand colors could help TurnKey differentiate from the competition and set ourselves apart within the travel and vacation rental management space.
Images from upscale magazines contributed to our research.
The orange background was TurnKey's colors painted as accent walls around the office
Value-drivers for travelers
Survey data value-ranked amenities for our target market
This data would help us as we got further into the redeisgn process. We wanted to target people familiar with vacation rentals, as well as people unfamiliar with vacation rentals who might be open to trying one out. If a particular experience or amenity was important to those guests, we could weave it into the brand narrative, especially the guest-facing website.
Factors that would make a non-renter consider a vacation rental. From Phocusrite’s 2016 study “A Market Transformed: Private Accommodations in the U.S.”
Initial design work
With our research complete, we started design. We started by working internally. After many revisions that didn't land, we looked to hire a contractor to help. Someone on the team had a contact, and it ended up that we found someone with a huge amount of talent to help us nail the look and feel of the brand. With a kernel of the new brand in place, we worked on refining and solidifying a direction that we liked.
Above
Starting with the home page, we found a style that would resonate with our target audience.
Below
With approval on a direction, we built out other pages on our website - the main interface for guests booking at Turnkeyvr.com
Style guides
It takes consistent work and strong execution to extend a visual redesign across an entire brand. Accountants, field operations specialists and data analysts appreciate having access to brand colors and typography inside of excel, google slides and more.
Brand guidelines
Knowing that there'd be lots of people working on the visual brand (designers, photographers, contractors and more) we created detailed brand guidelines. We created a library where people could go to download resources like fonts, logos, brand color libraries and Google slide decks.
Updated photography
Presentation was key to our value strategy. Even though we were aiming for a mass affluent audience, we knew that erring on the side of luxury in our presentation would increase the perception of value of TurnKey's service
Brand touchpoints
We created high-end magazine-style brochures to help attract owners to our service
In-house photography is expensive and time-consuming. So we used these bespoke images to the fullest advantage, creating new brochures, websites and handouts to show customers how our service was different.
Re-branded internal assets
Branding for internal documents
Branding isn't just about outward-facing materials. Steve Jobs famously argued for a high-polish design on the inside of a computer mouse. We didn't neglect internal teams - we created downloadable on-brand MS Office swatches for the data analytics and accounting teams
We designed an updated deck for sales and revenue management
Decks were often used to communicate revenue numbers to clients. We wanted to have every touchpoint be taken care of, so we designed assets for use by the sales and revenue management team.
Turnkey acquired in 2021
In 2021, TurnKey was acquired by Vacasa for $619 million. I’m proud that this project made a profound and lasting contribution to TurnKey, and that through the hard work of the founders and 100s of employees was able to participate in a liquidity event.
