In like a lion.
On like a sentinel.

AN OMNICHANNEL BRAND & MESSAGING SYSTEM FOR F&I SENTINEL.

It’s a rare and remarkable thing when the company that created a market remains the industry leader in that market. But that’s exactly what happened in the multi-faceted world of automotive finance and insurance products. F&I Sentinel—led by co-founders with nearly two decades of expertise in F&I regulations—is both the industry innovator and leader, standing guard over a complex regulatory landscape rife with consumer protection mandates.

F&I Sentinel’s highly skilled Concierge Compliance Team and its leading-edge CITADEL platform deliver uniquely effective managed compliance solutions. But with their continued growth and recent acquisition of Express Recoveries from Cox Automotive, their brand system, print and digital touchpoints, and product identities were in much need of an overhaul.

That’s why F&I Sentinel came to Sharpen’s omnichannel experience design experts: to apply a product-design mindset to the work of updating both the company’s brand and their flagship product’s identity. And to extend that thinking across a variety of media and channels—static and interactive—as part of a content strategy that reframes compliance issues from a one-and-done review to proactive and ongoing diligence.

Let’s take a look at how Sharpen’s design process approaches a brand design challenge, why it works, and how pairing a brand redesign with parallel collateral and asset creation can accelerate the development of a robust system you can start using in weeks, not months.

Differentiation in a new market.

Our analysis began by dissecting F&I Sentinel’s current-state materials—everything from their simplest business card and email signature to their most nuanced website and outbound communications (as shown, below). At the same time, we also conducted a wide-ranging survey of competitors and comparatives in other industries, specifically looking for how they represented themselves in pixels and prose.

These analyses are evaluative but offer tremendously generative insights. For instance, any time we assess the competition’s use of color (as shown, above), typography, and language, we have to ask:

What are the advantages of aligning with the competition?
What are the advantages of differentiation?

Often, the solution is a little of both—adhering to convention enough to be industry-recognizable while differentiating enough to stand apart from the competition. At their core, these are usability and messaging considerations, not subjective matters.

We also had the opportunity to start wireframing the website and other materials in parallel with the redesign of the brand and an exploration of the customer decision-making journey.

Often, brand work is done in isolation—the creation of a lovely mark and beautiful typography in a vacuum. But in our experience, pairing brand work with the creation of a variety of assets challenges the work-in-progress in much the same way usability and quality testing challenges digital product design by considering:

How will these brand assets work across multiple vectors and channels (e.g., email, large-format, presentations, print, social media)?
When encountered as part of a customer journey, how do the brand and each asset contribute to the story?
When these various media and channels are used side-by-side, do they reinforce or repeat one another?
Can the client use these assets independently, without the designer?

Bringing Apollo to life.

Like any design, a brand must meet certain requirements. And to maintain continuity with F&I Sentinel’s legacy as their industry founder and leader, we knew one of those requirements would be the retention of the company’s lion familiar.

So, informed by our competitive analysis, we set out to explore a variety of initial treatments that:

Employed a lion to represent a steadfast sentinel and protector.
Employed a shield to represent reassurance and protection.
Employed an ampersand (&) to represent bringing together ancillaries.
Gave the lion a forward gaze to represent proactivity & foresight.
And utilized a color palette that employed a conservative shade of blue appropriate for a financial and legal enterprise but also employed an automotive accent—not red because of its negative financial connotations but, rather, chrome for its association with premium accessories, clarity, and cutting edge.

*With these touchstones in hand, we set out to explore an variety of treatments that each emphasized a different aspect of the brand.*

*We also explored practical applications of the brand from the outset, to help our designers and our clients contextualize how a new identity recommendation would look and feel in the wild.*

Meanwhile, our approach to typography was similarly informed by research. Our team created a custom typeface derived from Helvetica Neue with slab serifs to be used only for wordmarks. The resulting crenellations reinforce the common link between the lion as an active guardian and F&I Sentinel’s Citadel® platform’s role as a source of strength and fortification.

Very quickly, the low-poly approach emerged as a client (and Sharpen) favorite. With subtle alteration and much nuance, Apollo (or Poly) was born—named for his low-poly high-tech render style and the ancient Greek god of prophecy, law, and wisdom (among other things) who was often the mythological protector of herds from pests and predators.

Content is king.

One of the most effective ways a company or product can marketing itself is with an assertive and consistent content strategy—targeting users and customers where they already are with meaningful content that frames information in a way that addresses their needs and drives them to appreciate the rigor and expertise F&I Sentinel brings to the table.

Our analyses and journey map research identified a number of prime opportunities to expand F&I Sentinel’s new brand and messaging in line with this content strategy and their business goals.

F&I Sentinel’s compliance experts share their analysis of the legal landscape on their website and in a customer Industry Insights newsletter. Our team built this document using off-the-shelf presentation software and a robust library of branded assets so F&I Sentinel’s team could create these publications in rapid response to changing legislation without ever sacrificing the integrity of their branded identity.

Our designers created a flexible presentation designed to make life easier for F&I Sentinel’s sales and marketing teams by providing them with a set of branded slide templates they can tailor to their unique needs.

There are still going to be times when you encounter users offline rather than on. Our designers worked with the client to boil the most salient pitch down to fit on a simple bi-fold brochure that can be used to support any trade show, executive meeting, or networking event with the same rhetorical strength as our website or other digital sales materials.

The future is electric.

Then we brought it all together—the new brand identity, style guide, messaging, expert-level, and sales-oriented content—with online tools, SEO optimization, and responsive design to deliver F&I Sentinel’s new website at www.fandisentinel.com. The result is transformative, demonstrating at every level F&I Sentinel’s commitment to getting compliance going your way.