New, AskUp - Renewing a Beloved Brand (Rebranding)
05/10/2023 | 3mins
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Rani (Brand Design)
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Those who are curious about or using AskUp
Those who want to know about the brand renewal and rebranding process
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The AI chatbot 'AskUp', which has gathered about 1 million channel friends, has undergone a brand renewal. We have included the process and reasons for thinking about the direction of AskUp and the newly established brand personality. Meet the familiar but new story of AskUp through the eyes of an upstage brand designer.
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✔️ AskUp Chat? AskUp Biz? AskUp Kakao?
✔️ AskUp with our concerns
✔️ Familiar but new New, AskUp
Hello, this is Rani from the brand design team. Did you discover New, AskUp, which has been hiding in the content related to AskUp since May? Before AskUp officially introduced the new look to users, we wanted to expose it little by little. I would like to tell you why AskUp, which was released on March 5th, was renewed after 2 months.
AskUp Chat? AskUp Biz? AskUp Kakao?
AskUp did not initially have the appearance of a product. In order to solve the tasks or questions of internal members of Upstage, ChatGPT was linked to the collaboration tool Slack to be used by users through KakaoTalk with the intention of 'I hope more people can feel the convenience and technology'. What became visible was the beginning of what is now Askup Chat. It took on the form of a formal product after AskUp Biz, a business version for businesses, was released as a beta service. As products with a slightly different personality and image from existing services targeting general users came out, Kakao AskUp Chat as B2C and AskUp Biz as B2B took a strategy of operating the service through different characters.
a. AskUp chat: Profile used from the time of application to Slack. An image embodying a 'friendly AI chatbot that responds to various questions' through image-generating AI
b. AskUp biz : A profile created by borrowing grid and smile from the existing AskUp chat(a)
Over time, AskUp Chat's profile started getting media exposure, and naturally it built up a lot of awareness. The problem arose at this point. Although the product names that B2B and B2C customers encounter are the same, the characters are separated depending on the channel they access, so they are not recognized as a consistent brand. In addition, the need for integrated branding was felt due to the difference between the appearance of Biz products to be publicized externally and the image of AskUp viewed from the outside.
“ I think it is the role of a brand designer to organize and present the direction a brand should go. “What direction should our AskUp and Upstage’s AskUp go?” I started to worry about “what kind of charm will it have?” ”
AskUp contains our concerns
Even when we were first thinking about renewal, and even now, AskUp is loved a lot, so we decided that radical changes could have a negative impact. Therefore, we approached renewal from two perspectives.
What should be left of the original AskUp ?
What personality based on the key keywords of the product can i fix it
1. What can be left from the existing AskUp image?
The first thing I was curious about was 'what is the big part of the impression of the existing AskUp'. To answer this question, I showed my AskUp profile to people I knew who had little to do with AI and asked them to tell me what came to mind. As a result, many people talked about 'expression' and 'marshmallow-like hair', and 'rainbow' and 'colorful colors' were also mentioned.
2. Extraction of key keywords of the product, and AskUp's Personality established based on this
Below is a series of steps taken to establish the personality of 'AskUp'
BX Team x Marketing Team's workshop to extract keywords for the characteristics and differences of AskUp as a product
Definition of 'what kind of service'
AskUp is an attractive service that actively responds to new information with high intelligence and learning ability, enjoys conversation, and provides fun features to interact happily with users.
Extract key keywords of products
AskUp is an AI chatbot that 'provides easy and fun conversations while being adept at handling situations'. Considering the characteristics of products that provide easy functions, keywords are also considered so that meanings can be conveyed intuitively, and the following Personality has been established.
Newly established AskUp's Personality
E asy-peasy : It is a more emphatic expression than 'easy' and has the meaning of 'really easy'. It expresses AskUp that provides intuitive usability.
Fun & play : It expresses AskUp that leads conversations easily and skillfully and provides interesting experiences through interaction with users.
S avvy : An adjective meaning someone who is clever, wise, and has a lot of common sense. It expresses AskUp that is proficient in various fields and influences users.
Familiar yet new New, AskUp
We started designing based on Personality, and now we have the shape of New, AskUp.
Simple form, friendly proportions
The existing AskUp was in the form of a human wearing a doll mask. It maintains the original face like a marshmallow, but adjusts the proportions so that it can be easily used in a digital environment, and is designed so that anyone can easily associate it.
friendly smile
In the case of chatbots that take the form of robots, facial expressions are usually centered around the eyes, and the mouth is expressed simply. However, in the case of AskUp, 'smile' was one of the biggest features, so it was designed in a form that could emphasize it. It shows how to recognize the world through an eye blinking motion that looks like a camera shutter is operating, and through this, we made it possible to emphasize the facial expression.
Various props and deformable objects
AskUp provides an exciting experience by interacting with users through conversations. The use of various props represents the versatile AskUp, and the changing object above the head represents interaction with the user.
a variety of colors
AskUp reads documents and photos and draws pictures, and various functions will be released in the future. To express this, we used a combination of colors that contrast with Upstage's brand color purple. Through this, we gave liveliness to the characters and expressed the infinite scope and possibilities of AskUp.
finally,
AskUp has gathered 930,000 domestic users in 60 days of launch and is on the verge of reaching 1 million. It is also a product that has entered the global market through the Line messenger. Renewing a brand that is greatly loved was a joy and a meaningful task as a designer. We hope that AskUp will grow rapidly, and the brand design team will continue to think about how more people can use AI technology as well as AskUp easily and happily.
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Upstage, founded in October 2020, offers a no-code/low-code solution called "Upstage AI Pack" to help clients innovate in AI. This solution applies the latest AI technologies to various industries in a customized manner. Upstage AI Pack includes OCR technology that extracts desired information from images, recommendation technology that considers customer information and product/service features, and natural language processing search technology that enables meaning-based search. By using the Upstage AI Pack, companies can easily utilize data processing, AI modeling, and metric management. They can also receive support for continuous updates, allowing them to use the latest AI technologies conveniently. Additionally, Upstage offers practical, AI-experienced training and a strong foundation in AI through an education content business. This helps cultivate differentiated professionals who can immediately contribute to AI business.
Led by top talents from global tech giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Naver, Upstage has established itself as a unique AI technology leader. The company has presented excellent papers at world-renowned AI conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, WWW, CHI, and WSDM. In addition, Upstage is the only Korean company to have won double-digit gold medals in Kaggle competitions. CEO Sung Kim, an associate professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is a world-class AI guru who has received the ACM Sigsoft Distinguished Paper Award four times for his research on bug prediction and automatic source code generation. He is also well-known as a lecturer for "Deep Learning for Everyone," which has recorded over 7 million views on YouTube. Co-founders include CTO Hwal-suk Lee, who led Naver's Visual AI/OCR and achieved global success, and CSO Eun-jeong Park, who led the modelling of the world's best translation tool, Papago.
