American Express

Challenge

Amex was evolving from a payments business into a service platform. It had been 10 years since they articulated what they stood for, what the company does and where the business was headed. They needed a compelling experience to rally all employees toward driving growth in a challenging environment.

INSIGHT

Stakeholder interviews and market research revealed that the brand needed a unifying platform that created a clear editorial voice, developed a unifying language, set the tone for future communications and incorporated employee voices. The experience needed to elevate their internal platform while compliment their existing internal communications.

Solution

The creation of Indigo, a living breathing magazine. Every quarter five unique stories that demonstrated Amex’s culture of service would be sourced, curated and told in unique formats relevant to each story. Interactive features included visual storytelling elements like theater-formatted video. Audio formats that incorporated employee voices, and interactive elements that allowed every employee to have a direct dialoged with the CEO about the direction of the business.

Plotting new territory

To provide a guideline for a new experience, we first looked at the various ways in which brands have created editorial experiences to communicate with employees, consumers and customers.

Content Types

To ensure we were developing the right content types we spoke with 17 different stakeholders throughout Amex's global network and examined their existing internal communications. The result was a set of guiding principles and a framework of content types.

Defining service