Scaling Salesforce's Brand Through Strategic Design

Few companies have witnessed the seismic growth and expansion that Salesforce has experienced over the past decade. This is not just financially or through headcount, although both of those have skyrocketed (adding more than 60,000 people and bringing in billions more in revenue).

But Salesforce has also amassed a broad suite of products that span nearly every aspect of its customers’ needs. And consistency is difficult to manage in these conditions. 

The Challenge 

While it may seem easy to lump all leading tech companies together, they don’t all operate the same way. For Salesforce, branding and a strong visual identity have always been core to its beliefs as an organization. It values innovative experiences and a cohesive appearance in the market. 

Where many tech companies are similar is in their marketing structure, with product teams charged with getting their lines of business to win in the market and creative teams trying to keep everything looking as one brand. Continuing to stretch the realm of what’s possible on the product side while not losing sight on who you are as a brand is not an easy tight-rope to navigate. 

And like every tech company, Salesforce faced the challenge of conveying its complicated products and benefits clearly to prospects, customers, partners, and employees. But its teams are often focused on business priorities and don’t have the bandwidth to creatively support the brand’s growing ecosystem. 

For more than a decade – going back to the acquisition of ExactTarget – Salesforce has relied on Studio Science to help walk this tight-rope as it needed to grow, scale, and innovate as quickly as possible. 

The Solution

As the longtime design partner to ExactTarget, our first objective in 2013 was to help integrate ET into the Salesforce brand and family of Marketing Cloud products. We worked alongside executive, product, and marketing leadership to strategize and create alignment to the overall Salesforce brand. But that was just the beginning. 

Since then, we’ve helped position Salesforce’s products and integrate the look and feel of other new business units. Word of mouth of our reputation grew, as well as our involvement in core projects that supported all clouds. We have partnered with Salesforce’s core leadership team and products – including Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, MuleSoft, Slack, and Data Cloud – collaborating to communicate in more compelling ways to their audiences. 

How that communication happens has varied dramatically, ranging from creating go-to-market campaigns and assets to keynote presentations at Salesforce’s biggest events each year. Additionally, we created experience maps to align customer expectations with company initiatives and led the prototyping of future-facing products.

When Dreamforce moved to a hybrid event for the first time in 2021, it was Studio Science that Salesforce leaned on to help deliver a critical keynote – from co-founder Parker Harris – designed for a new audience: the Salesforce Architect. The result was a collaborative, iterative, and compelling story arc that engaged this new audience and propelled the initiative into long-term success.

More recently, the partnership led to Studio Science helping the Commerce Cloud team brainstorm how to create go-to-market assets that position its Core and Commerce Cloud platforms as best-in-class solutions and help the team grow its pipeline. The result was a fully interactive demo showing the power of the platform in a real-world scenario. 

The Impact

The results of the partnership have been on display countless times across nearly every aspect of the Salesforce ecosystem. Over the course of 12 years together, the number of projects Studio Science has delivered on behalf of Salesforce is now in the thousands. 

Because of this history and familiarity, the agency understands Salesforce’s brand – and can pivot smoothly with its constant updates and evolutions – so much that it can deliver a level of ROI others can’t reach with its efficiency and institutional knowledge. Meanwhile, Salesforce teams are freed up to tackle the biggest challenges that come with reinforcing the brand of a Fortune 500 company.  

While competitors are struggling to communicate complex ideas clearly or are overly focused on touting new products or features, Salesforce is reaping the benefits of having consistently valued, people-centered, and design-led communications. With that as a foundation, the company can continue innovating at its rapid pace and shows no signs of slowing or relinquishing its market dominance.