Introducing: Moder

Building a new brand that resonates with US buyers, with a truly global operations footprint in only 6 months under a tight budget.

The Context

Market Conditions: We started this project in the Fall of 2021. Record low interest rates were still the norm but there were whispers of the Fed’s aggressive stance against inflation. This means that by the time we planned to launch, our target customer may need more help in reducing costs vs. increasing revenue through originating loans. This gave us a window into messaging and created uncertainty over Moder’s planned expansion to South America.

Market context: The mortgage market is oversaturated with mortgage outsourcing options and our target customer is generally very savvy at buying and evaluating new RFPs.

The Competition: There are several entrenched brands in mortgage outsourcing already. Our competitors’ marketing strategy is a events marketing via in-person industry events and price undercutting. As such, the established competition gave little thought to messaging, copywriting, or modern marketing best practices. Indeed, many of our competitors’ websites look like it is still being built via engineers using stock photos from the year 2000. In order for us to stand out, every interaction a prospect had with us needed to facilitate the impression that “we’re the new, younger kids on the block and we do things differently.”

Background: Archwell Holdings was created to serve the mortgage industry and it identified a gap in mortgage outsourcing it wanted to fill. Namely, mortgage outsourcing has been run by the “same old guys” for decades and it was time for a new brand to usher in the digital transformation and optimistic ethos that Archwell planned to bring to market.

Timeframe: 6 months

Requirements: The name and branding must resonate with U.S. customers, and be unoffensive in several languages where the outsourcing operations would be located.

Support: For this project, I selected a branding agency and worked with a graphic designer contractor to bring this brand to life.

Budget: Less than $100k, 3/4 of which went to the agency we hired. The budget meant we had to be very resourceful in how we build, launch, and promote this new company.

Building the right messaging

In order to build the right messaging, it’s important to get two things exactly right: (1) who do we want to target and (2) what do they care about?

In the last 10 years, Mr. Blue Suit, the vanguard of mortgage C-level executive ruled the roost. This person is not likely to try a new outsourcing firm so they are not our target. But their direct report - the Gen X to older Millennial junior exec waiting in the wings would be more willing to buck tradition and speak to a new comer. I’ll call these folks Jr. Blue Suit and they were the buyers we needed to persuade with our marketing.

Our brand needed to appeal to this younger junior executive by speaking to their ambition, and by empathizing with their challenges.
The next generation of mortgage bankers want to change the way this industry runs - from the tech stack (digital transformation) to how key processes are handled (operational improvements). But, banks have a hard time making changes and the market was forecasted to undergo tremendous headwinds so our messaging and visual imagery needed to speak to these two main challenges in an honest and tone-appropriate way.
We selected an off-black and off-white palette with bold accent colors to counteract the sea of blues and navy this world often leans on. We wanted to stand out visually and to make sure that our imagery and brand elements told the story of people working with people, and of incremental change leading to major transformation.

Layering our messages

Our brand pattern is composed of incremental tick marks, which transform and move as a unit showing how orderly steps can make up a pattern to transform the whole. This pattern was used as the backbone of our templates.

This pattern spoke to themes our customers believe in which are:

Progress happens in little incremental steps
The power of a collective team moving in unison is unstoppable
Small seeds of growth can change the future
Alignment to process makes sustainable change possible

We launched in August 2022.

By the time we launched, the US Federal Reserve hiked interest rates up several times with no plans to stop in sight. As such, we doubled down on our cost-reduction messaging and focused on building relationships with key mortgage executives tasked with managing costs. Unfortunately, Moder’s first year in existence was in one of the toughest outsourcing markets in decades. But as one of the few new entrants to this world, we garnered a lot of attention right when our target demographic naturally needed to re-evaluate their existing contracts.

Here’s a few tips I’ve learned thanks to this experience.

Keep the branding committee small & be clear on what “contributing” looks like

The company CEO wanted his top lieutenants to be involved in this process - but it was unclear what each person was meant to do on these calls. Meetings had to be made 3-4 weeks out to accommodate a 12+ global leadership team which delayed progress by months. Leaders didn’t always know what was expected of them so meetings were largely unproductive and long.

Quadruple check all name options with various dialects within associated countries

Unfortunately, the first name we all really liked was an offensive word in the area of one of our call centers - but none of our team leaders spoke that dialect so we did not learn of the gaffe until 2 months before launch. Queue dramatic last minute meetings and some really weird google searches across the brand team.

When in doubt, go without

When it came time to select a logo, no logo felt “just right” to our CEO. We spent weeks trying to make something work. Time was of the essence because we needed to launch the company in time for a major industry event so the decision was made to go with just the stylized typeface of the company name without a visual graphic to encapsulate the brand.

Best decision ever. This allowed us to move forward without committing to anything we’d have to pull back later. Plus, it gave us the freedom to add something that made sense down the line without the fear of introducing any confusion to our customer base.

Be very clear up front who is making the final call.

It was unclear to the agency and to me how the final decision would be made. A lot of back and forth could have been prevented if only we understood from the beginning how calls would be made.