How We Helped an EdTech Enter the Indian Market: Our Project with Educate Online

Entering a new market can be a daunting challenge. To stand out among competitors, it is important to not only have a relevant product but also to connect with the audience. We collaborated with Educate Online to create a brand identity that not only fully represents their brand, but also resonates with the Indian market.

We are Obra, a digital design studio, and we work with FinTechs, EdTechs, crypto, and all sorts of startups, to help them show their best selves. Lately, we’ve found ourselves often helping a company enter a new market, and here’s how one of those stories went. In this article, we'll showcase how we've made a brand identity for an EdTech in 2024.

B2C EdTechs must connect with more than their students

EdTech is a rather particular niche. Not only does it swarm with competition, but education itself is a very personal matter, where everyone charts their own course. Not only do you offer a product, but you’re also asking your audience for a massive investment of time and effort, for a future and somewhat nebulous reward. More than any other service, an EdTech has to connect deeply with its audience.

It is an extremely competitive market, where you have to stand out and look serious while remaining friendly and approachable. Your audience is diverse, with all kinds of people wanting to learn for all sorts of reasons, and that’s just the potential customers. The brand identity has to appeal to teachers, potential employees, and investors as well. And it gets even more complicated if your audience is school children. Now you have to consider their parents as well, as they’ll be making the decisions, but the kids still have a say.

Companies must consider all these factors while creating their brand identity in the EdTech market.

Research, culture shock, and the puzzle we had to solve

What Educate Online does is help provide access to modern Western education to developing countries. With Educate Online an Indian student can get a high school diploma from the US or Canada, and get a leg up for their further education.

Initially, Educate Online lacked a cohesive brand identity. The website looked in one direction, targeted ads looked in the other, social media the third, and so on. An EdTech needs a cohesive identity to connect with the audience.

We began with extensive research on the market and found the field to be visually rather uniform. Way too many brands just settled on white backgrounds and tired metaphors, that either had no concept to them whatsoever, or something vague about some sort of journey.

Entering the Indian market we’ve faced several challenges. There is a bit of a culture shock when you enter a Zoom call expecting to talk to a single person and instead find yourself talking to a whole family. More importantly, we’ve found that the Indian audience is often wary of digital services due to the prevalence of online scams. We had to present more than an approachable brand, we needed to be trustworthy.

Our challenge was twofold: we needed to create a brand identity that represented access to Western education and that stood out positively in the Indian market.

From global to local, from general to particular

We’d started with several concepts until we hit the spot with the aesthetics of old Western Colleges. However, the first iteration flopped hard. While our task is to present Western education, it doesn’t have to be so daunting. Not too many people in the twenty-first century want a stern, hundred-year-old professor. We're presenting Western education by playing with iconography, taking familiar symbols and framing them in a new way with a new coat of paint.

The final identity represents a modern, digital, and global approach to education that is also fitting for the Indian market. Rather than going for cliches, we make the brand feel at home with a very particular color scheme full of warm reds and yellows, and AI-generated photos of Indian schoolkids.

We decided to forego illustrations for several reasons. Firstly, there’s too much samey lineart used in EdTech brand identities, it’s tiring and doesn’t catch the eye anymore. And it’s still something of a conservative market, as people take their education very seriously, so you can’t go wild with the visuals. Second, it would be too resource-intensive to create bespoke illustrations for each new web page for a different course, for each new print ad, and so on, the style simply doesn’t scale well.

Instead, we chose to use AI-generated photographs. We might’ve had to discard some six-fingered and three-eyed results along the way, but the rest was perfect for the tone we were going for, as well as being far, far easier to make than costly photoshoots on location.

The brand is very flexible in several ways: first, it adapts well to any medium, be it a corporate website, social media, or print ads. Second, it works for any audience. Bit more colorful and cheerful on social media for the school kids, and more reserved for the parents on the website. A couple more elements are stripped down, and then it's a serious corporate identity that suits end of quarter reports for the employees and the investors. If Educate Online decides to extend further and enter another market, most of the work would be done after generating some new photos and changing the color scheme.

We left the designers at Educate Online with an extensive 65-page guideline and found the in-house team to be more than up to the task. Moreover, even if we built the identity from the ground up to be very flexible, we ourselves were surprised at how well it works in every medium, from webpages and social media to a newspaper ad.

By using AI-generated photographs, a unique color scheme, and familiar yet modern symbols, we were able to create a brand identity that stands out while also being approachable and trustworthy for the Indian market.

To sum up

• EdTech companies need to connect with their audience from the first engagement, especially if the target audience is children.

• When entering a new market, Western startups need to adapt to local customs and culture to avoid potential issues.

  Full case on Behance