Positioning and rebranding a VC
A new case study from The Human Half
At the end of 2019—so, around 300 years ago—I partnered with the tall and talented Dan Greene of Greene & Sons to help position and rebrand London-based MMC Ventures.
MMC invest in early stage tech companies and have the likes of Gousto, Bloom & Wild and Unmade in its portfolio. They’re also very nice and have excellent taste in furniture. MMC needed help positioning themselves distinctively in the crowded VC market. And they wanted a new visual identity and new messaging to reinforce that position. Happily they appointed us to help them do it all.
One thing that sets MMC apart, we quickly learned, is their exhaustively researched industry reports, covering technologies like blockchain and AI—topics immensely relevant to their founders. Our friends at MMC were keen to capitalise on this, but weren’t sure exactly how that should manifest, or whether they was something they weren’t seeing.
To ensure nothing was unseen, we conducted many hours of interviews, speaking at length with MMC team members, tech company founders and investors.
We learned that, generally speaking, VCs don’t have a great reputation with founders. Founders are especially wary of VCs being either passive, detached or not having relevant experience to their particular challenges. In contrast, MMC had a positive reputation as being uncommonly committed, knowledgeable and rigorous. They turn up to meetings well-prepared, remain intimately (but not overbearingly) involved and dedicated in a way founders find impressive, reassuring and rare.
What struck us was that MMC’s famed research was only the thin end of a more ‘ownable’ wedge. It wasn’t only that they took the time to understand the tech and business models of their founders. Founders also recognised that this was backed up with a broader sense of commitment and integrity at every level of the firm.
On the back of this, we helped MMC to position themselves as the ‘Deeply Invested’ VC, something that rings true from top to tail, from tech reports to human rapport.
This idea of being ‘Deeply Invested’ mirrors the mindset of their tech company founders, who share MMC’s belief that the deeper you go to understand and rethink fundamentals, the greater the transformational potential in a market. This yin and yang—depth and transformation—became the basis for much of the design and messaging development. We would bring the new MMC brand to life using this concept.
For positioning projects, two-sided marketplaces are often one of the biggest challenges to a singleminded solution. In MMC’s case, the other side of the market is the investors whose money they manage. The Deeply Invested positioning works here too, because being so involved in these tech businesses and their ecosystems provides credibility and insight. What investors want more than anything is insider access—a VC who understands what’s going on and what is most likely to happen next.
A positioning strategy is one thing, but it’s important that design and language then reinforces rather than weakens that position. As such, a new visual identity was born, or rather painstakingly developed, led by Dan at Greene & Sons.
We think it’s pretty fresh and quite different to other VC brands. But we would say that…
You can see the full visual identity case study over at Greene & Sons’ website.
Or take a peek at MMC’s new site.
Andy Whitlock is Chief Simplifier at The Human Half.
“Working with Andy was excellent. We needed someone to who could get a sense of who we were as a business very quickly and help us shape a simple message to share with the world. Andy delivered that speed and simplicity brilliantly. He really understood our internal dynamics and how to present results in a way that brought the team together. He was able to challenge us but also align stakeholders so the project ran really smoothly. The whole team was happy with the result and we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend him.”
- Anna Slemmings, Director, Marketing & Investor Relations at MMC
MMC have also written a great post all about this project. Lovely to see so much of the research and thinking laid bare like this. Read it here.
