We are very proud to have been part of scoutAsia, a new corporate data and news service from Nikkei and the FT. The service provides up-to-the-minute data, news and context on more than 500,000 Asian companies – including private firms – across more than 20 countries in North Asia, South Asia and ASEAN.
We worked with teams in Tokyo and London to take the project from proposition development and prototyping all the way to positioning and branding.
Dan Bogler, Managing Director, scoutAsia, had this to say,
After the flood were invaluable partners in this project, from ideation all the way through to the completed service. They quickly understood both the internal and external needs of our companies, quickly recognised the data gaps, and rapidly prototyped concepts for testing. They helped us develop a brand new service that addresses the unique needs of both our markets
Developing the proposition through prototypes
We initially built on research carried out by IBM. We focussed this down after depth interviews with financial professionals and our network. Through earlier work, we have built a large network of financial services professionals over the years and their insights into M&A, growth, distress signals and ownership structures were invaluable.
Branding the service
Through a series of group discussions, brand archetype workshops and internal research we developed a brand that would fit the iconic FT & Nikkei tradition but still allude to the modern technology brought by this new service. Underneath the visual brand elements was a positioning of ‘frontier confidence’. This highlighted Scout’s ability to overcome the challenge of researching Asian stocks from the West.
Integrating with engineering
From the start of the project, we worked closely with the FT and Nikkei engineering teams. The project cadence meant that stakeholders in Tokyo and London were kept abreast of our progress and engineering teams were involved in all product decisions. Completed designs and design principles were then passed on to the internal team they built to run scoutAsia.
You can read more and sign up for a free trial for scoutAsia on their website.