Evolving voice while maintaining brand for Sauce Labs’ website.
How I made Sauce Labs appeal to developers, startups, and enterprise.
First, a home page refresh.
The first round focused on key words targeted to Enterprise (reliable, secure, scalable), but kept our fresh voice to cater to our real audience: developers. The only problem was the idea was too small, and it focused on what the product actually does - testing.
Then another more “adult” take.
After partnering with Analyst relations, the team wanted to focus on upleveling Sauce Labs part within an entire testing automation ecosystem as part of continuous integration and deployment, which we considered an advanced best practice. This messaging was targeted to the decision maker, a high level technical leader.
But our core audience was still developers, so I took a “mullet” approach to copy: business in the front, and party in the back
After upleveling the messaging to appeal to the enterprise audience, I had to find ways to avoid alienating the core audience of developers and open source advocates. I approached this as “surprise and delight” by preserving some of the pep from the brand in-product (a user message read “Saucesome!” when a test passed, where the core audience would remain) and within the name I gave to a new ambassador program I launched (Secret Sauce).
