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How our brand is shaping our products
Meet our heroes
We’re excited to see our global brand strategy coming to fruition around the world. Brand architecture is all about how we organize our brand portfolio. Until now, Pearson has often been perceived as a “house of brands”, a holding company containing many apparently unrelated brands. Our new brand architecture approach is helping us become a coherent and customer-facing “branded house”, in which our brands are clearly connected to each other and to the Pearson master brand.
We’ve established consistent naming principles and visual treatments across our portfolio, and ensured that our individual brands “ladder up” to the Pearson brand. This is not only strengthening our individual brands, products, and services, but also making our offer a simpler and clearer expression of our brand vision: “Empowering human progress through learning.” In doing so, we’re building equity into our master brand and creating stronger long-term emotional connections with our millions of learners and customers.
So far we’ve completed around 25 brands, including ‘master brands’ such as Pearson English, ‘Pearson brands’ like PearsonMyLab, and ‘endorsed brands’ such as Wizard by Pearson. We’re already seeing highly positive feedback from our customers and learners, and we look forward to assessing the impact of further planned launches throughout the year. The brand architecture rollout is a huge on-going project – and a crucial step in helping us become recognized, trusted, and respected as the world’s learning company.
To find out more about our new approach to brand architecture, please click here.
We’re proud to announce the recipients of our inaugural Brand Hero awards. The awards were created to recognize and celebrate the work of those employees whose brilliant ideas, boundless enthusiasm, and hard work are going above and beyond the call of duty in bringing the Pearson brand to life around the world.
We received nominations from every corner of our business, and our first batch of winners includes individuals as well as teams. We’re pleased to be able to highlight their achievements and award them a beautiful handmade award to thank them for inspiring us all. To find out who won and why, please click here to visit the brand space.
Do you know any Brand Heroes? Nominate your colleagues here.
Beautifully bold and colorful, our brand patterns are a distinctive element of our visual identity, adding vibrancy and fun to our communications. We’ve been busily creating a new batch of patterns, by running design workshops and opening up the challenge to everyone in Pearson with our recent pattern competition. We received many fantastic submissions from across the business, and special congratulations go to our winners, Jennifer Aumiller (Graphic Designer, Higher Ed) and Claire Deakin (Customer Training Specialist, UK PQS Customer Services). Their brilliant ideas were artworked by Together Design and have already been brought to life on our new merchandise. Great work, everyone!
You can read more about our Pearson pattern competition winners here.
Show us what you can do We’d love to see how you’ve been bringing the brand to life in your office, so we’ve set up Show and Share, a quarterly design showcase. It’s the ideal opportunity to share your inspiring efforts with everyone at Pearson – plus there’s a prize for any projects we feature in Design Matters.
To find out more and get involved, please email us at [email protected]
Focus on… Patterns
Bringing the brand to life
If you’re planning to create materials for the Pearson master brand, you’ll find comprehensive guidelines, visual assets, and much more on our brand hub at
brand.pearson.com. If there’s anything else you need to know, or would like to see featured in future issues of Design Matters, please email [email protected]
How is the brand strategy coming to life through the web?
With the launch of the new Pearson.com/us and Pearson.com/uk sites, we’re seeing the beginning of a consistent use of the brand “look and feel” across our web properties. This consistency will strengthen the Pearson brand and our customers’ experience, and will become more apparent as additional businesses merge into these sites, and new regions move onto the OneDotCom platform.
How are you working with the UX teams globally?
Collaboration is crucial to the project. When tackling a design or UX challenge, we always start with user research. So we’re constantly leveraging the great work by other UX teams across the business, and sharing what we’ve learned through our own research. We’re also planning to start a Design and UX Center of Excellence to exchange ideas and best practices with people throughout Pearson.
Which other brands’ websites have inspired you for the project?
We always look at how our competitors are handling the issues we share with them, and we also consider organizations that have broad and deep offerings across multiple geographies, such as Microsoft, BBC, Adobe, GE, IKEA, Amazon, and Apple. Whenever we see anyone solving a problem on the web in a fresh and different way, we ask ourselves if what they’re doing might benefit our users.
What are your principles for great web design?
• “Express the brand”; the website is critical to creating a customer experience that influences how we’re perceived.
• “Be ever evolving”; we continuously iterate based on testing, research, and feedback.
• “Design systems, not pages”; we build a foundation of flexible templates to create a cohesive, consistent experience.
• “Put the user at the center”; we always want to meet and exceed their expectations.
• “Mind the details”; they make our sites a pleasure to use, and differentiate us from our competitors.
And finally, what’s it like to be recognized as a Brand Hero?
Being recognized as a Brand Hero is something that I wasn’t expecting. I’m so honored, but we wouldn’t have the brand success we do without the awesome team that’s behind me. They are always up for the challenges of the branding in the digital landscape… and that makes them the real brand heroes.
Want to learn more about our brand? Download the brand guidelines from the brand hub here.
Leolie Marquez, Director of Global Design, OneDotComLeolie is leading the design of our OneDotCom project, which is transforming our global web presence into a user-centred, globally consistent yet localized experience for all our customers and learners. She’s also recently been recognized with a Brand Hero award. We asked her a few questions about bringing the brand to life digitally.
Above: An overview of the brands resolved to date and the new categories they will fall under.
Issue 6 | June 2017
News, tips and best practice in Pearson brand design
Design Matters
Piero FranceschiMarketing VP, Pearson Brazil
As well as breathing new life into the Wizard brand, we now feel much more closely connected to the Pearson master brand.
Five questions for…
Fresh thinking and new challenges A new generation of ideas We’re always looking to encourage exciting creative ideas that will enable us to deliver better learning to everyone. Partnering with design organization D&AD, we set a brief to students, challenging them to design a product or service for 2027 that delivers education at a global scale. We received 153 submissions from across the globe, with all kinds of impressive creative responses. It’s given us inspiring insights into how one of our key audiences thinks and what makes them tick.
In July, our 12 winners will find out which prize category they’ve won. Check out the winning entries here.
Building our pictogram libraryOur pictograms are simple graphic representations of objects, places and people. We already use many of them across our commu nications, and with the OneDotCom and Global Learning Platform projects currently in progress, we’ll need lots more. So we’re building a pictogram library which will give all our employees a unified resource filled with illustrative assets that are tailor-made for our brand.
To find out more about the project and suggest themes for the library, get in touch with us at [email protected].
Above: Our final set of vibrant new patterns.
Our winners so far:Daniel Hoadley, Sharon Mayers, Matthew Dickin and Claudineia Santos. For the full list of winners click here.
Top: Leolie Marquez, Director of Global Design, OneDotCom Bottom: Pearson.com/us. The new “front door” for our business, where customers can find everything they need.
Above: Students preparing for Pearson’s D&AD challenge – ‘Shake Up Education for 2027’.
