Marktplaats Redesign

Brand identity redesign while maintaining customer trust and revenue

CLIENT

Marktplaats

Sector

E-commerce

DATE RANGE

21.2.2015

2.1.2017

Summary

Assignment

With over 8 million unique visitors per month and 4 new ads per second, Marktplaats has been one of the largest online marketplaces in the Netherlands since its inception in 1999. Every change to the platform has an effect on the consistent stream of income that comes from professional traders, advertisers and services such as integrated shipping and payments. It wasn't until 16 years after it was founded in 1999 that the competition and urgency to renew the visual brand identity were felt. It was an honor to take on the challenge with Marktplaats: ensuring digital innovation while maintaining brand value and income.

Team

In the first period, as one of the two designers at Marktplaats, I supported the app team with UX design, prototypes and user research. After some time, it became clear that true digital innovation required a reorganization, where the platform teams and other discipline silos were rearranged into multi-disciplinary, self-managing journey teams where each team became the owner of part of the end-to-end customer journey. In this new structure, I supported multiple journey teams with UX discovery and delivery and interviewed applicants for the vacant UX positions.

Services

Customer Journey Mapping

Background

Challenges

How do you introduce a new visual identity while maintaining familiarity and trust for a corporate identity that has remained almost the same for 16 years?

In interviews with respondents, where we asked for personal opinions about the Marktplaats color palette, image and word mark, people were unanimous: old-fashioned, out of date and “dirty brown”. However, further research in a neuro test lab measured very positive brand associations among the same respondents: the brand evokes trust, benefit and nostalgia. As an innovation, we therefore opted for a subtle approach in which we changed the “dirty brown” to a warmer earth tone and complemented the rest of the palette. The adjustments were gradually and silently brought to production over a year.