Local data analytics company Hotjar has launched a new brand, with a ‘new shiny logo, a blazing new set of colors, and a playful new typeface’, and shared with its followers the process it went through to come to it.

Hotjar, which was acquired by data analytics giant Contentsquare last month, said it wants to build trust with transparency, in line with its values.

“For us, a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a service or organisation,” it explains.

“What’s your immediate reaction to, let’s say, McDonald’s or Etsy? And how do brands create those feelings?”

It claims that strong brands make you want to be part of their world.

“Strong brands make us feel a certain way. And this leads us to do certain things. We’re much more likely to buy from them and talk about them with people at work, friends, or family,” it said.

While some may think that branding is more important in the Business to Consumer (B2C) segment, Hotjar makes it clear that Business to Business (B2b) companies are pouring a similar amount of emphasis and investment into their brands.

It explains that when it asked its users how they felt about Hotjar, a recurring theme that emerged was that “Hotjar is for start-ups”.

Making it clear that there’s no problem with being just for startups, the company explained that its reach has grown beyond just the start-up world.

“Our audiences are often product teams sitting in organizations of up to 10,000 people. They can also be businesses as small as 50 people, sometimes even smaller.

“The one thing we heard from you loud and clear was that our brand wasn't inclusive enough. We were failing to embrace our full community of students, entrepreneurs, SMBs and mid-market enterprises.”

Hotjar knew it needed to do something. To create a brand that would take it into the future—and show the world who Hotjar really is — it needed to tie together the three areas of users and audience, product vision, and purpose.

Together with London digital design agency How&How, Hotjar came up with a new icon.

“We started with a line in motion to represent our users and their individual journeys. Then, in the second sketch, we visualised human connection and our Just Cause with duplication and symmetry.

“In the third, the flame is to honour our past and caters to audiences who recognise the flame as Hotjar. The three combine to form the icon you’ll soon be seeing everywhere.”

The rebranding needed to go beyond the icon, so Hotjar engaged the “excellent” CoType™ Foundry for a new typeface. Ambit is “legible, clear, and accessible”, but it’s also “fun, playful, and full of personality”.

“It has an empathetic touch, so we felt it was just the right typeface to headline our product.”

See Hotjar’s post here to find out how they revised their colour scheme and introduced new elements.

“As you’ve probably gathered,” the company said, “our rebrand was an exercise in how we make people feel, and how we want you to feel about us in the future.

“So we wanted to say a huge thank you — really thank you doesn’t feel big enough — to our users. Without you none of this introspection would be possible.

“We hope you like where we’re heading, why we’ve done it, and the story of how we got there.”