Connecting people with brands, everywhere

Connecting people and businesses in today’s digital landscape is complicated. In 2008, Sinch’s founders set out to transform customer communications and make it a “sinch” for businesses to engage in meaningful conversations with their customers. In less than 15 years, the company has turned into an international powerhouse serving enterprises across the globe and handling over 600 billion engagements per year — talk about hypergrowth! Sinch’s Customer Communications Cloud now supports messaging, voice, email, video, verification, and more.

Sinch uses Frontify since 2021

Brand Guidelines

Digital Asset Management

Sinch’s brand is responsible for awareness and visibility, and Frontify helps the company continue to grow, adapt, and shine. Speaking with Gwen Lafage, VP of Brand and Content at Sinch, we tried to pinpoint what makes brands tick and what role they should play on a much larger scale.

1. Guiding the brand perception, not controlling it

Brand perception
For Gwen, brand is perception. Some things can be controlled while others can’t. But those things can at least be influenced.

“You can’t control what people think of you, but you can influence how they perceive you as a brand.”

Gwen Lafage

VP Brand and Content

The role of a brand team in a company is to build a solid brand foundation. This includes defining the visual identity, establishing a clear positioning, and creating a compelling message that resonates with people and succeeds in the market. The Sinch brand must join people together internally and rally them around the same story. This has not been an easy task for the company, which has grown rapidly since the early days. However, internal alignment around the brand and its core values is crucial for delivering best-in-class services.

“We have also just redefined our positioning and are getting ready to roll it out externally. As the company grew very fast, not everyone knows who we are today. We have a constant need to build brand awareness globally.”

Gwen Lafage

VP Brand and Content

Uniqueness, culture, and design
The culture and people at Sinch are its strength, so the brand identity has to represent the company’s core values: striving to keep things simple through hard work, collaboration, and creativity. The recent transformations that boosted these values and made them more visible included a brand refresh in 2021. Since then, the brand has continued to evolve, building up its visual identity and conveying a unique blend of who Sinch is as a company, its customers, and its employees.

2. It takes big and bold investments to build a brand, even with a great product

Challenges and acquisitions
Defining and polishing its identity with an external agency allowed Sinch to see what was working (and what was not). The company made adjustments along the way, but navigating even the positive changes can be tricky. Sinch acquired several companies, which added more brands and complexity to its portfolio. Their consolidation under one roof would always be challenging, as there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Thus, navigating constant change requires a solid and consistent story in continuous “work-in-progress” mode. Keeping a high level of quality throughout this process further complicates things on a global scale, which is why Sinch combined in-house designers with agencies to help build up the hub and make the design stand out.

3. Your brand is your people — so investing in your brand is investing in your people

Brand community, engagement, and a strong employer brand
As we know too well, a brand can only be as strong as the people behind it: They’re the ones carrying the brand everywhere. In other words, a brand can be ruined for someone just because they had a bad experience with an employee. Employees must be your first brand ambassadors, as they’re your most important representatives. Facilitating a community and employer brand is essential to building a strong brand — probably even more so in the fast-moving tech environment. Strong visibility and awareness are indispensable for success and must be nurtured from within.

Employees play a very important part in this equation — they’re the experts who sell and represent the product. People buy from people. So, the role of a brand team is to set the foundation, build up employee advocacy, and create a brand that empowers employees to become true ambassadors at every touchpoint.

“Following the launch of our new visual identity, Frontify’s brand hub helped us with bringing more consistency across projects, teams, and campaigns. For this, we even published a new website and developed a brand video as well as several product videos to explain what we do and how we do it. On top of this, we also started a new podcast and participated in several events to introduce our new story to the market.”

Gwen Lafage

VP Brand and Content

Before and after
Building a brand hub takes time and work. But the process pays off: Your brand will have one source of truth and can evolve while staying in touch with all stakeholders. This is especially evident as the company continues to grow globally, with more teams needing to use the brand. So, easy access and a more explicit connection to the brand have resulted in better, more implicit engagement.

“It took us several iterations to get to the brand we have today — to a brand we love. Fast growth means everything moves fast. So constant change is hard to follow. We made the hub very user-friendly and easy to navigate to enable such rapid growth and brand adoption.”

Gwen Lafage

VP Brand and Content

“Our brand hub is designed for ultimate efficiency. Instead of stopping my day to gather logos, illustrations, and templates for my colleagues, I send them to the hub and know they'll find what they need because it's all there. It's a time saver and go-to spot for brand materials.”

Jan Ritter

Director of Marketing

What’s next for Sinch
As Gwen highlights, Sinch will focus on strengthening employee advocacy and turning employees into brand ambassadors throughout 2023. That’s where the brand journey will continue growing and help shape the Sinch of tomorrow. What an exciting journey to be part of!