Thomas | One Brand, One Voice:
Elevating an established brand for future growth
Repositioning Thomas as an innovator and category leader by defining a new category, aligning the business behind one story, and building a brand ready for the future.
Role: Head of Brand & Social
Reporting to: CEO and CMO
Partners: SLT, Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success
Timeframe: May 2025 - July 2026
Team: 2 designers, 1 developer, 2 Copywriters, 1 Social Exec.
Scope: Brand strategy · Brand architecture · Narrative · Guidelines · Website · Social · Experiential
The challenge
Thomas had a strong reputation in assessment, but that reputation had become a ceiling. As the product suite grew, messaging fragmented across products and channels. The market still saw Thomas as an assessment tool rather than a platform for organisational connection and performance.
The business needed to grow brand awareness, reach and advocacy, and reposition the solution in a way that Sales, Product and Customer Success could all get behind. A full rebrand wasn't the answer: the equity in the brand was too valuable to throw away.
Strategy:
Creating a new category: Connection Intelligence (CXI)
I led the creation of a new market category, Connection Intelligence (CXI), to move Thomas beyond assessment and into organisational connection, transformation and performance.
I did the initial concept and design work myself: defining the new brand architecture, refreshing the brand framework and writing the strategic brand narrative for CXI. Rather than rebranding, we sharpened what was already there. We unified fragmented product messaging into one confident platform story that could flex across every channel.
A quote from the CEO:
“So we’ve been working for months, and the biggest shout-out I can give is to the man who’s on my bottom-left screen, which is Dan Gregory. Dan has worked hours that most of us can only entertain in our worst nightmares. He started at 5 a.m. and finished at 10 p.m. most days, including weekends, to pull this material together with such zeal and enthusiasm.
And so having done so, I think we’re in a position that most software companies will never find themselves in, let alone the other psychometric businesses. And that is a story of such clarity, such purpose, such elevation that it will separate us from everybody else that tries to be like Thomas.”
Taken from transcript of company wide CXI launch meeting 25.09.25
Leadership and alignment
Reporting to both the CEO and CMO, I worked with the SLT to make sure the brand strategy served the wider business objectives, not just marketing ones.
I presented the CXI strategy and new brand architecture to the executive team and board in September 2025 with sign off and the green light to roll out across the company.
Getting a new category adopted means more than launching it. I partnered with Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success to embed CXI as shared organisational language, so the people closest to customers were telling the same story.
Sales began using the narrative in pitch decks and Product adopted CXI naming in the roadmap.
Bringing the brand to life across all touchpoints.
The story stays the same wherever people meet it.
The brand system: robust architecture, flexible framework
I overhauled the style guide and brand guidelines and turned them into a set of interactive Brand Playbooks. They give every team member the tools to tell the same story, with the flexibility to tell it in their own way.
Social.
Be different. Stop the scroll. Grab attention. Create engagement.
I introduced a more structured approach to social, built around an evergreen content strategy designed to stop the scroll, build community and drive advocacy.
Creation of a storytelling engine that allowed us to create a more effective posting cadence that harvested a rich archive of content from scientific research, thought leadership and product experience plus activating an Employee Generated Content system, to give us more reach and authenticity.
Website.
I led a full overhaul of the website to bring the CXI narrative to the front and turn visits into engagement.
Oversaw site prototype development with design, copy and dev teams to create new site templates and functioning test site. Project managed the migration and site launch from early concept to delivery. Presented new site to SLT and board members to demonstrate improvement in site experience, uptick in dwell time and increase in top of funnel leads.
Events & experiences.
I took a new approach to experiential design at HR events and thought-leadership events. I created spaces that brought CXI to life and kept Thomas front of mind with the audience that mattered most.
Working closely with the Product and Psychology teams, I led the creation of the Connection Advantage Game: a gamified, bite-sized experience of the CXI platform in action. A few psychometrically validated questions revealed each person’s Connection Power, which they could compare with colleagues, along with quick tips on communicating better with others.
We built a booth version for the stand and a mobile version that invited people to visit us to collect their Connection Power sticker. The result was more footfall at the stand, a natural icebreaker that helped our sales teams start deeper conversations and generate more qualified leads, and a stronger brand presence at every event.
Tiny Thomas: putting people at the heart of the brand
As part of our brand expansion, we wanted to introduce a custom illustration style that could be used as an alternative to photography in our design materials.
This allowed us to illustrate Connection Intelligence in action at differing scales: from the individual, to teams, to the full organization, a useful asset for infographics and marketing materials, adding a human touch in a way that’s refreshingly different from the tired stock photos our competitors rely on.
I created Tiny Thomas, an illustrated library of personas, each with its own name and psychometric behaviour type. It let us show people of all genders, ages and ethnicities in the context of work, without relying on photography.
Craft and process. I used an AI model carefully trained on my illustration style to generate the initial characters, then did the post-production work in Photoshop to refine each one into a consistent final library. The characters became the cast for our explainer videos and supporting graphics on the website, marketing materials and event collateral.
