Hello all! The last few quarters have kept our team super engaged working on some exciting product innovations. What also kept us super busy was a massive rebranding exercise. Before I get into the finer details, I’d like to thank you for being a part of our amazing growth journey and supporting us throughout. Your feedback, ideas, and unwavering faith in our products and services strengthen our resolve to offer you world class HCM software solutions.
We are thrilled with our splendid revenue growth in FY 22-23. We added 400 new customers to the HROne family. It’s great to see the flawless execution of our growth strategy that has led to this exciting phase of our journey. A crucial component of our growth strategy has been our brand. In the yesteryears, we have come a long way in building the foundation for our brand DNA. It was also a period when each one of you acted as our sounding boards – helping us realize what’s resonating and what’s not cutting through.
The Essence of Our Vision
We strongly believe that having a deep and well-thought-out brand DNA is foundational to our success. We also realize that it takes time to build a brand. Like other brands, when we started, we had product advantages and attributes to drive brand awareness. Overtime, besides innovation-led product growth, we knew it would be the intangibles like brand values, brand associations, brand purpose, and the brand vision that would prevent substitutability.
Revisiting our brand DNA was part of our roadmap – a milestone we hit a couple of quarters back. It’s been an arduous but a very fulfilling journey, to say the least. As we went about figuring out our Golden Circle, we reflected on some fundamental questions like “Why do we exist?” – a question that seems short and easy but takes weeks, if not months, to figure out the answer to.
Figuring Out Our Brand DNA
We believe that an HR professional’s time is way too precious to be spent only on processing paperwork and we’ll do everything possible to help them free up their time and mental space for creating high impact in their workplaces.
We envision a world where HR professionals are free to focus on what truly matters—cultivating a thriving workplace culture, nurturing talent, and driving meaningful change. By harnessing the power of automation, we enable them to unleash their creativity, strategic thinking, and innovative solutions. If we were to sum up our brand essence in one succinct statement, it’d be this: “Driving peak performance for aspirational HRs through the use of HR automation.”
Our brand purpose and vision set the foundation for our values which are articulated below:
#1. Design for People
Authenticity is key in every action we take. We are empathetic to the needs and wants of every individual– both internal and external stakeholders. We model our products around existing HR processes to make a real impact in making the lives of our customers easier.
#2. Own the Experience
Every HROne team member feels accountable and responsible for our customers, our team members and our community. We focus heavily on customer support and are committed to delivering top-notch customer service.
#3. Lead with Results
We’re a team of passionate people who believe in challenging the status quo to drive better outcomes for our customers and communities. We’re driven by passion and curiosity. We’re always improving and innovating.
Our Rebranding Journey
We did a thorough analysis of our goals, competitive landscape, our customers’ challenges, motivations & hot buttons, brand touchpoints across their journey, and lastly – crystallizing our value proposition. This was Phase 1 of the program which lasted for several months. At the end of it, we successfully finalized our brand DNA: the vision, mission, purpose, personality, and values.
Phase 2 of the program involved translating our brand DNA into our visual identity and building distinctive brand assets leveraging it. We shortlisted several concepts and routes to crystallize our brand identity. Multiple teams including sales, marketing, product, implementation, customer support/success, HR, and finance tirelessly worked on brainstorming and zeroing-in on our new brand assets. It was a great ride – full of self-exploration, deliberation, and lateral thinking.
Unveiling Our New Identity Tagline
And with this new brand identity comes a powerful tagline: “Your Workplace. Your Way.” It captures the essence of the freedom you deserve—the freedom from mundane tasks that hold you back. With automation at your side, you can shape a workplace that truly inspires, that reflects your unique vision and values.
Mascot
We proudly introduce our new mascot: The Black Buck. This majestic creature represents the people who drive organizational success that embodies agility, endurance, and a deep sense of social affinity.
Logo
Behold our new logo, a modern interpretation of this magnificent being. It embodies uniqueness, boldness, and a forward-looking spirit. It stands as a testament to our commitment to innovation and pushing boundaries.
Typeface
Say hello to our primary typeface – Clash Grotesk. It perfectly embodies our brand personality and ensures our distinctiveness.
Our secondary typeface – Public Sans: a contemporary sans-serif typeface – ideal for long form text and product experience.
Colour Palette
Our color scheme incorporates a harmonious blend of dark green, orange, purple and yellow. This combination evokes a distinct sense of vitality, passion, and vibrancy that aligns with HROne and our audience. It symbolizes our loyalty, trustworthiness, and clarity in our services. Our brand palette is complemented by additional colors which infuses our designs with flexibility, visual interest, and warmth. Our colors can also be expanded to using tints – this gives us flexibility, especially in our product, and adds depth to our illustrations.
Aligning With Customer Needs
The HCM SaaS software category has evolved significantly over the years with several levels of innovation – both transformational and substantial. We firmly believe that product innovation is critical to building differentiation in this category. If you look at our history, we have gone miles to keep reinventing our product. Quite a significant chunk of our revenues has gone back into upgrading the product to meet evolving needs and to disrupt this category with features like InboxforHRTM HR Desk or reforming our implementation and customer success methodologies.
To this end, we have a very strong product roadmap that’s going to bring in transformational and substantial innovations in the marketplace. We’ve recently launched WhatsApp bots for employees and candidates and there are many others in the lineup.
At the end of the day, all our innovations are going to heavily draw from our brand purpose which is based on “valuing” the precious time and mental space of HR professionals. Hence, we focus on doing everything possible to take away complexities of the day-to-day HR operations and that includes being able to easily use their HCM software.
Our Pledge to the Future
We will do everything humanly possible to activate our brand purpose. And this will be guided by our brand value structure –POWER – Design for People, Own the Experience, and Lead with Results.
Everything that we do to help HRs maximize their potential – whether it’s introducing that great new disruptive feature or moving mountains to turn that complex implementation into a cakewalk for the customer or helping them get the maximum value from their technological investments – is guided by POWER.
We will continue to catalyze the movement to empower HRs to build inspiring workplaces and be the change agent they need to be able to make it happen. We realize the need for HR teams to get their act together, mobilize resources, and deliver to the management the transformation they have been asked for.
There’s zero scope for transferring the process complexity to the customer through the software. If it’s not simple, it’s not software. It’s just a little better workaround. This forms the basis of our product positioning – you’ll soon hear from us on this one – stay tuned.
Signing Off and Way Forward
We are confident this post would have left you as thrilled, as all of us as HROne are here, about our collaborative future. Stay tuned for some more posts in this series as we dig deeper into the art and science of activating our brand purpose, and understanding how our new brand identity will fuel our growth.
This rebranding program will be a shot in the arm for enhancing our customer value proposition, building a culture that’s inspired by our brand values, and forging a stronger connect between our brand and our valued customers.
Thanks again to each one of your – our customers, employees, HROne alumni, industry experts & analysts, and our investors for helping us bring our purpose to life by using automation to turn ultra-busy HR professionals and employees into super-productive and champions of change.
Here’s to many more milestones ahead of us. Let’s shape the future of automation and inspiring workplaces, together.