After this merge, there was a conversation around simply just taking on the Agoda branding. Boom. Done. Easy. It still however, made sense strategically to have our own brand that we could continue to build in the U.S. (Agoda is primarily in the APAC region). After a few chats, it was decided that we would create an evolution of the early brand I had created For Rocket Travel, with a nod to Agoda.

Prior to starting this brand evolution, we conducted quite a bit of research to see what elements of our existing brand felt strong and what areas we may have been lacking in. We had calls with partners as well as internal stakeholders, compiling all of the gold that we collected along the way. Once we had a clearer picture of the direction we wanted to go in, it was time to get to it. I spent a lot of time highly caffeinated with some music going, to establish roughly four different visual directions that were feeling good. I stepped away from them for a day and came back with fresh eyes to consolidate them down to three. I only had a few full frames for each direction, a logo slide, a font slide, brand colors slide and one off the wall example of what creative executions might look like. Each had a varying level of Agoda branding to it.

I met with both the greater marketing and design teams at Rocket to get some initial thoughts and feedback. From there I was feeling confident with our three looks. This is where it got tricky, in then taking these to our Rocket Travel leadership and soon after, the Agoda leaderships teams, with whom I had not yet met. While everything was actually incredibly well received, two things were pretty clear. The first (which was to be expected) was that having all of these very strong and varying opinions created a bit of a loop or back and forth. The second, being that most of the individuals in leadership, were quite busy and sometimes a bit slower to get feedback across. This is where I felt the need to take the reins a bit more and bring this thing home. I asked my direct manager, for a list of the individuals we absolutely needed to weigh in. This helped me prioritize a bit. I set a strict timeline in which I’d be taking feedback, set up a doc where it was easy to drop in thoughts and lastly scheduled another meeting to talk through changes. I let everyone know that it was important that we kept this thing moving, and also made sure to acknowledge any and all concerns or thoughts that were given. We ended up agreeing on a direction after the meeting and had some slight late in the game rules that we were going to need to follow. No problem. From there we were able to build out the rest of the relevant brand guide pages and thus create the new look Rocket Travel by Agoda.