A truly uplifting tale of Elovo

The back story

Tillo, the rewards, incentives and gifting platform, saw an opportunity to spin out a new offering from their business. With employee gifts becoming an increasingly important part of staff retention – and with working from home rules making it much more difficult for employers to give staff a little something to say thank you – they set out to create something unique.

The new platform enables businesses to send gifts, both physical and virtual, directly to their people – simply, easily and at scale – wherever they are in the UK. And by bringing together many familiar brands offering everything from from high-end indulgent treats to fun, affordable thank-yous, it creates the opportunity to make a much more emotional connection than would be possible with vouchers alone.

The quest

The Tillo team asked Rooster Punk to help them develop a name, positioning, brand story, visual identity and brand voice. With many employees working from home, it was becoming much more difficult for employers to give physical gifts, so the time was ripe for Tillo’s new offering. We wanted to launch the brand quickly to allow their team to start engaging prospects and building a market as soon as possible.

Insight and strategy

Social listening by our intelligence team indicated that although players in other areas of the market talked about the emotional impact of employee gifting, they did so (paradoxically) in slightly clinical terms. Many were talking about ‘collaboration’ and ‘social bonds’ in a way that felt more apt for an anthropological study than in a conversation about something as innately pleasurable as gifting.

If any area of B2B needs humanizing urgently, it’s this! Receiving gifts makes people feel good. And giving gifts makes people feel good too. Our strategy was to create a brand idea that would allow Tillo’s new offering to own that feeling: the uplifting fizz of happy hormones that gifting brings to everyone involved.

The story

We created the concept of ‘corporate lifting’, describing the effect of rewarding staff through thoughtful gifts. We invented the terms ‘lifter’ to describe the team manager, HR lead or whoever may be giving the gift, and ‘lifted’ to describe the recipient.

Creative development

We trademarked the name ‘Elovo’, connecting with the ‘lifting’ concept and maintaining a connection to Tillo through the final ‘o’ sound. We developed a bright, fun and fresh visual identity that related to the Tillo mother brand but had its own distinct personality.

As part of the design system, we created a unique set of icons to represent the different gift categories and some of the major brands offered on the platform. These are constructed entirely out of a unique shape that features in both the Tillo and Elovo logos.

We developed a unique brand voice for Elovo, bringing all the fun and unadulterated pleasure of ‘corporate lifting’ to life in a truly distinct way. To quote our lovely client, Hannah Dempster (who led the project for Tillo), “This is the least B2B brand voice I’ve ever seen.”

Activation

Team Tillo asked us to propose some launch comms for Elovo, and we created a suite of assets for use mainly on social channels to bring the idea of ‘lifting’ to life. With a liberal sprinkling of humour, we used video, photography and one of our favourite formats, the Linkedin ‘spillover’ ad (where the content from one post appears to spill out into the next) to show people being physically lifted by the pleasures of gifting through Elovo.