Cognizant Interactive
Organization | Cognizant Technology Solutions
My Role | Brand Audit, Creative Strategy, Copywriting, Project Management
What does it mean to build a new agency model
from inside a global tech corporation?
Background.
Cognizant’s Digital Experience Services Unit (then called Content & Design Services) had achieved substantial growth by constantly innovating and raising the bar for digital-first communications. In 2012, C&DS discovered that it had a bit of a perception problem.
Insight.
The complex size and sprawling network of the organization was getting in the way of giving digital services clients ideas that could reach across all the channels.
Our company brand audit and surveys had all pointed to this complexity. The pace of innovation had led to a wide range of touchpoints that needed to be holistically pulled together.
Content & Design Services (C&DS) needed to step out of its generic corporate tethers and demonstrate its distinct value within Cognizant’s larger portfolio of service offerings. A large part of the challenge was in being able to communicate this value effectively and coherently to a wide range of stakeholders – both internal & external.
Objectives.
Our mission was to organise and consolidate the dispersed service offerings of C&DS into a unified brand that could adapt with the business, and thus enable Cognizant to pioneer a leadership role for C&DS in the global digital solutions realm.
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Develop a visual identity and naming system for C&DS that would help to unify the culture of Cognizant as well as its competence in the digital space
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Help the new enterprise break away from the monotony of dusty, old ‘IT’ stereotypes and become one of the world's leading full-service digital interactive agencies
We were tasked with creating a brand language that reflected this change. The scope of work ranged from a full positioning, planning, and creative engagement, to a re-orientation and revitalisation of an internal brand that had not matured alongside the business.
Developing a visual
vocabulary.
The rebrand needed a design vocabulary that symbolized its dynamic category presence and reflected the attributes it aspired to i.e., mobile-first, tech-native, strategic, agile and purpose-driven. In a break from the sterile, product-focused, world of corporate branding, we decided to zoom in on something radically different: imagination & play.
Our moodboard included mental models, wireframes, info-visualisations, organic hand-drawn sketches and several other signifiers of the digital landscape.
Agency culture as a visual motif is central in this approach.
‘Digital is the new real.’
Based off of this strategic groundwork, we developed a suite of illustrations and animations that are used throughout the campaign; visual flourishes that nod to design and agency culture (the digital world as a playground of ideas). The use of fluid illustrations across the system feels choreographed and has a sense of constant movement – always forward. It has a playful energy that facilitates storytelling and amplifies content.
Our goal here was to create a brand language built on the finer details of what a digital experience team does i.e., unleashing the imagination and ideas of its people to deliver tangible business results.
Rebranding to unify.
Creating a distinct brand.
We developed a creative brief based on the shared vision that this rebranding was about making sure that Cognizant Interactive could effectively combine its strengths with those of the rest of Cognizant’s technical and business capabilities.
The strategic unlock was to create a distinct brand where the organisation could be really honest about communicating to a client that we are bringing these unified solutions so there’s no competing forces getting in the way.
Disrupting the agency model.
It was an evolution in Cognizant’s journey to build a new in-house agency model—one with the power to engineer transformative brand experiences and infuse those experiences with the emotional and inspirational power of design thinking and creativity. The rebrand reflected the long-term vision of what the company aimed to become: a combination of creativity, technology and intelligence.
Content and Design Services (C&DS) thus became Cognizant Interactive (CI). It stands on the shoulders of the powerhouse that is Cognizant, allowing the team to do anything technologically possible for their clients.
A fundamental shift in how enterprise reinvention is done.
A furniture company had to temporarily close more than 500 stores as Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012. In response, Cognizant Interactive helped the company build an e-commerce platform including virtual sales assistance, order tracking, and flexible payment options.
Similarly, a website redesign for a private bank in North India ended up transforming it into the country’s first digital-only banking platform. Instead of trying to solve this problem with advertising or marketing alone, we built digital platforms to reimagine their e-commerce business.
Seen this way, the Cognizant Interactive rebrand isn’t just an aesthetic change: it reflects a fundamental shift in how total enterprise reinvention is done. It’s a radical step, but one that’s necessitated by equally radical changes in the marketing landscape for clients.
Implosion of touchpoints.
Over the years, the digital needs of clients have fanned out into different genres, from UX to content design, campaigns to community management. Every one of these departments manages a touchpoint between the customer and the brand. There is not just an explosion of channels, but an implosion of touchpoints, down to a single one: the smartphone. With digital, all channels come together.
To capture the next waves of growth, businesses now need to operate at the speed of life, perpetually demonstrating their relevance to their customers, their people and the world at large. Cognizant Interactive, the brand, symbolises this next wave, bringing a joyful functionality to digital experiences. Moving from distant and corporate to being more human scale, approachable and integrated.
“From emotional, impactful, memorable, all the way up to scalable, repeatable, and measurable.”
— an excerpt from the Brand Book
Bridging top-shelf creative work with world-class consulting and digital transformation became the key conceptual foundation for the rebrand. It was about taking the creativity of a design or UX team, which is about ambition and understanding, and spreading it to all parts of the organisation as a united front from a geography and capabilities standpoint.
This was back in 2012, and in hindsight, it’s clear that agencies were only just starting to move towards integrated, centralised marketing teams.
Cognizant Interactive wanted to step up and occupy that market gap: become an end-to-end client partner, capable of solving for digital with emotional, impactful, memorable, all the way up to scalable, repeatable, and measurable.
Brand portal.
As the lead strategist and brand owner, I worked with a team of designers, client partners and business heads to develop a brand portal (strategy, values, tone of voice, execution guidelines, asset library, etc.) that would signal to both clients as well as internal stakeholders that Cognizant Interactive was more than just a spoke in the wheel. These underlying principles imbued the brand with a wide range of flexibility, invisibly enhancing every asset and curating a sense of belonging, all with precision and confidence.
The resulting work included not only a new visual language and website, but also new templates and tools, new icons, a complete brand book, and company values designed to guide Cognizant’s next decade of experience-led thinking.
2012: Year of Digital.
To launch Cognizant Interactive, we built a campaign around 2012: Year of Digital, articulating how each characteristic of the brand unfolds, and how they all fit together. One first mode of expression was a desktop calendar. These concepts were then extended to a series of unique and exclusive assets, including marketing collaterals, corporate environments, signage, e-newsletters, posters, mailers, flyers, badges, business templates, you name it.
