OPPORTUNITY
How might we create an active community of Unlock FM podcast’s listeners?
SOLUTION
As a Product Designer, I re-positioned the product strategy, crafted content strategy, and built a new brand identity across all digital platforms.
OUTCOME
I have given the founders clarity on their product positioning, engagement, and brand to sustain an engaged community of Unlock FM listeners.
Discovery
As part of my onboarding, I led a kick-off workshop with two Unlock founders to understand their products' vision, unique selling point, and target audience. I synthesised my learnings into three key points:
1. Unlock FM's vision was to inspire Vietnamese people to unlock their full potential.
2. Podcast aims to become the first and the best Vietnamese media house company in 5 years.
3. Unlock FM core audience are the people like us: early career Veitnamese speaking professionals.
MY ROLE
- Product strategy
- Branding
- Testing
- Content strategy
PROCESS FOLLOWED
- Discovery
- Ideation
- Feedback
- Testing
- Design
- Content strategy
How might we create an active community of Unlock FM podcast’s listeners?
Each community needs a home, a sense of belonging. I decided to tackle this challenge by firstly building a distinct and resonating brand. To build Unlock FM personality I asked the founders: "How does Unlock Fm want to be perceived by others?" Unpacking each of their answers, I narrowed down Unlock fm personality to four key pillars:
Unlock FM's current brand across key digital touchpoints: Facebook, Spotify, Instagram.
Ideation
I forced myself to quickly sketch as many variations of the brand logo as I could. Out of 90+ alternatives, I relied on the key brand principles to filter down to the two most potential candidates for further development.
Feedback
As I presented two options to the founders, I've received two conflicting pieces of feedback. While they both personally preferred the Option 1 - one of them was afraid that we might risk alienating our audience as they might perceive it as too artsy/designy.
To test our hypothesis, I recommended the team to present two brand directions and ask selected listeners: "How does this make you feel? Why?"
Testing
80% out of 12 listeners found Option 2 more eye-catching and memorable than the first Option, which was mostly described as cool but not understood. Some associated two half circles as pieces of furniture, others with food or animals.
As both 'cool' and 'resonating' were our brand principles, we had to weigh each brand principle's importance against Unlock fm's vision. We soon agreed that making the brand resonating was more important than 'cool' - hence the team came to an agreed decision to go with option 2.
Design
To further strengthen cultural context, i brought Vietnamese touches to the brand identity: adding colors from Vietnam war and signs from vietnamese alphabet.
I then created brand templates for different contexts across all social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, and Apple podcast. I made them flexible enough to adapt to the different contexts of use, such as brand collaborations and special initiatives (Discover Weekly series). Finally, I built a design system that defined Unlock FM colors, type, and templates.
Content Strategy
I then created a user experience journey for the team to align content and brand direction. One of the most significant changes I've introduced is to use one consistent Spotify theme for each episode instead of tailored photos with guest speakers. This way, we could change the audience's perceptions from "I am here to listen to this guest" to "I am here to listen to Unlock FM."
As part of content strategy, I created a tone of voice, engagement strategy and objective for each social platform, and put down the key metrics that we want to track to measure our success: e.g., the number of reposts, comments, likes, listeners.
User experience map, highlighting user's objectives, feelings and touchpoints.
Outcome
We are gearing up towards the rollout plan in early November this year. In the meantime, bringing product design lens to the team has brought more clarity and focus across Unlock FM's initiatives.
1. Product’s positioning: to create a recognisable Unlock FM’s voice, our team decided to shift the focus away from the guests to the hosts buy creating more hosts focused content.
2. Engagement: to activate our community, we will collect the community’s feedback and tailor our content based
on their needs.
3. Brand: to succeed in our mission, we will use Unlock FM’s brand as a guiding principle for everything we do and don't do.
My key learning
Creating a new brand identity is only the beginning of the journey to building an actively engaged community. We, as an Unlock FM team, should be consistent and intentional with everything we do across product, content and design.
