With 3.7 billion credentials in the world — both in digital form and physical such as cards — the Visa brand is recognizable to nearly everyone and has long stood for trust, security, acceptance and inclusion. Over the course of its 60+ year history, the company has maintained leadership by anticipating the future of commerce. Yet to most people, Visa has been synonymous with credit and debit cards, making it important to ensure it is seen as more than a credit card company and understood as a trusted network that empowers people and businesses to participate in the global economy.
Mucho, in collaboration with Visa, was tasked with creating a new brand identity system to change this paradigm — to re-position Visa as the network that enables the movement of a transaction from point A to point B, whether it’s person-to-person between friends, cross-border remittance payments for family members living abroad, or real-time payments for hourly workers in the gig economy.
The Strategy – Brand Blueprint
It was critical that the new Visa visual identity system represent the brand purpose and overall mission of the company at large. Visa did a significant amount of quantitative and qualitative research, including 200+ hours of conversation with key stakeholders in a range of markets.
These studies led to the creation of the Brand Blueprint, which lays the strategy and foundation for the Visa brand, culminating in its mission statement:
“We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere.”
Design Principles
Building upon the brand strategy, Mucho developed six design principles to act as guardrails and reference points for everything that we would develop within this new brand identity. These new principles can guide internal teams and agencies around the world when rolling out the brand.