Airbnb is changing the way people travel – 15m people to be more precise. It offers an alternative to traditional travel accommodation where owners or “hosts” rent out their properties.

Traditional businesses are struggling to keep up with Silicon Valley. But these businesses are in the process of launching incubators and disrupting their usual ways of working. This means that the startups already at the forefront of the sharing economy are realising they still have a long journey ahead of them to build the brands of the future to keep challenging the status quo.

Airbnb’s vision to become a universally recognised brand synonymous with travel, hospitality and sharing, resulted in a serious brand re-evaluation just over a year ago. The business had expanded rapidly to more than 800,000 listings globally and yet the brand was not delivering this vision. But its profile had. People had bought into the proposition, but the brand identity didn’t reflect that. Unitl then, the brand had been focusing on the practical of “what” the company did, but the “why” needed to be part of the story and to give reasons for people to believe in it.

This is where we came in. We were chosen to work with their team to build the brand and deliver the “why”, and we flew to San Francisco to meet the founders. To win the pitch, we went as far as building our own Airbnb listing in our London studios to get under the skin of the brand.

For Airbnb, the first step was to understand the brand on a global scale and specifically the community that underpins the ethos of the brand itself. We sent four team members to 13 cities, staying with 18 varied hosts across four continents over four days. Armed with a basic video camera, they captured their journeys. This combined with more than 120 interviews helped us to understand the spirit of Airbnb and the emotional connection that their community has with the company.

It fascinates us when we come across authentic messages from real people that resonate and encapsulate exactly what the brand wants to communicate. With Airbnb’s community, we found exactly this. With listings in 190 countries, the new brand needed to work on a global scale with a recognisable logo echoing the sentiment of the community; one which transcended language and culture, and encompassed the company’s beliefs to stand the test of time.

Author Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a field. After we spent more than 13,000 hours working on Airbnb, the result was the new brand, personified in the Beló (Airbnb’s logo’s new name). Beló delivers the idea of “belonging” in a form which can be drawn by anyone and recognised the world over.

And recognised it has been.

Upon unveiling the new identify, I was expecting the design community to be as split as always. After all, every brand project needs the good the bad and the ugly to cast their eye over it and express a personal opinion.

As we listened to Brian Chesky announce the brand to the world via a live-stream, the reaction was pretty amazing. We want people to question why does a brand exist? What’s its mission? Who are Airbnb? All good stuff I want people to talk about. The team took every blog post, tweet and tumble with good humour. The logo was compared to a lot of things, from an A+ symbol, running rivers and tracks, and of course sexual imagery, but what’s important for us was that within hours it was being recreated and personalised by the community as intended.

With some rebrand projects we stop at the identity. But in this case, we were fortunate to reimagine all areas of the brand, working closely with their in-house team. This went as far as a complete redesign of the website and app. Our team used our work on the brand, to ensure the quality of user experience and clarity of expression across all brand touch points.

This was a brand launch that got people discussing the power and value of brand. It made a connection with people who hadn’t heard of Airbnb before and empowered those that had already experienced it. Nearly 20,000 people have already used create.airbnb to build a unique version of the symbol specifically for them, embracing the opportunity to make it their own.

Ultimately, it enables the brand to act and speak in the way that the founders always wanted it to and lets the community be part of this growing conversation.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/