We have rebranded!
Over the last couple of years, Cellulant has evolved to become more than just a business but an idea and belief that Africa’s future belongs and will be built by Africa. This belief has seen us scale across multiple countries, evolve and innovate around the solutions we offer to the market and build a great digital payments ecosystem serving businesses and millions of their consumers across Africa.
Our brand is an extension of this belief.
But why rebrand?
The most straightforward answer is that it was time. Cellulant is experiencing a season of renewal- a new chapter. We wanted our brand to reflect this new chapter.
In refreshing our brand, we looked at the entire brand holistically – including building a solid brand platform to create a strong synergy between Cellulant and Tingg brands. This included bringing a lot of clarity on how we communicate to our customers.
“What does Cellulant do?” Yes- we have heard that question a lot. And while we think we have improved our communication over the years, we needed to become better at answering that question. So part of this rebranding meant relooking at how we communicate to all our customers and partners and ensuring there is no ambiguity about what we offer them and their customers. When a business reads/hears about Cellulant, experiences our digital payments platform on Tingg – they should see how we can partner in their digitization journey.
Choosing the right partner
The right partner can make or break your branding journey. From the get-go, we were very clear on the particular skill set we needed. In the initial stages of this journey, our team got around a table and looked around and asked ourselves, “who among us has built a $1b global brand?” While we had built Cellulant into a great Pan-African brand, we needed global brand-building expertise. Therefore, we needed to get a partner on board who was not only aligned with our transformation-first lens of the world but had a proven record for building global brands.
We found that partner in West.
They are every brand manager’s dream partner. What you want in a brand agency is their ability to understand your business as well as you do and bring new insights to elevate your brand. The West team felt like they were part of Cellulant- collaborative, agile, understood our challenges and identified opportunities at every step in the journey.
So what has changed?
Let’s first look at what hasn’t changed.
Our purpose hasn’t changed. In refreshing our brand platform- we needed to go back to the foundation that makes us Cellulant. At the heart of our brand is a mission to create prosperity and opportunity for all of Africa and realise this through Tingg- our Digital Payments Platform.
The most visible change is our visual identity- namely, our logo and overall visual system.
The visual identity definition was probably the most debated part of this journey. We wanted to simplify and elevate our visual identity system. The previous Tingg and Cellulant marks were a bit more linear and resulted in visual flimsiness. So in choosing a visual identity system we chose one that gave us a cohesive visual system that shows harmony between the Tingg and Cellulant brands.
Our refreshed brand system delivers a bold, clear, and concise visual presence that aligns with our brand strategy.
Brand and Culture
Culture is a very special piece that directly relates to our people and our collective vision, and how we connect to the world. We believe that culture, much like a brand, always exists whether it is consciously constructed or not. Therefore, as part of the rebrand, we wanted to relook at our culture because we believe that each employee contributes directly to the growth and success of the company
In particular, we refreshed our employee value proposition, values, and overall employee experience and how these different pieces of culture come together and give life to our brand and who we are as an organisation.
Refreshing our brand identity is both an acknowledgement of a new chapter as a business but also an affirmation that our mission and commitment to Africa still stands. Cellulant continues to be shaped by a belief that the success of people and businesses in Africa is the foundation of transforming the continent.
We are excited to see the work finally come to life as we implement the different brand elements across all our communication platforms.
