GoCambio is a fee-free website, which brings people together as host and guest. It’s sort of a language version of Air Bnb – travellers get a place to stay in return for providing their host with language tuition.
Founder Deirdre Bounds already had a wealth of experience in the travel sector, having set up ethical tourism and TEFL business I-to-I, before its sale in 2007. Launching GoCambio as a start-up business in the sharing economy sector presented some new challenges. In order to find the meaning at the heart of the GoCambio brand, we interrogated their values through a hierarchical process, designed to define their personality in more specific, tangible and emotive terms.
This process enabled us to redefine their core brand proposition in a much simpler, more human language. Please scroll through the slides below if you want to understand more about how we put this structure in place.
The ‘what’ of the brand (what customers see from the outside, looking in) had highlighted three main areas to explore through visual language. The discovery stage looked at ‘unique experiences’, ‘common ground’ and ‘a cultural exchange’ as areas of inspiration, although only two of these ideas were taken forward and developed as brand concepts.
Unique experiences
“You’re unique, just like everyone else.” Defining the unique is problematic, as by its very nature, it comes to mean something different to everyone.
We looked at postcards as a way of documenting people’s individual travel experiences. They are shared with those we love, our friends and families, “Wish you were here, miss you, visited here today, loving the weather…” Whatever the message, they are personalised by handwriting and signed-off with a signature. This idea informed the hand-drawn styling of the logotype.
Common ground
Intersecting and overlapping shapes create a common ground – these shared spaces make a third place, where elements combine to create something new. Colours are fresh, bold and vibrant.
This combined thinking led to the creation of a brand marque that draws on both personal and shared experiences, to convey not just the explicit ‘what’ of GoCambio’s offering, but also the conferred and implied messaging of how their business works and why it exists.
The feedback from the client was that what we delivered is ‘not just a brand, but a philosophy’; which gave them more than a visual language, it helped to provide a new way of thinking about their business and its intrinsic value system.
“Love it, love it, love it, wow!”
Deirdre Bounds, Founder GoCambio.