Soma

Background

Zigbang is a South Korean property technology business. In the midst of global COVID lockdowns, whilst other companies were moving to Zoom or Microsoft Teams to keep their teams connected, they created something completely new.

Soma is a co-working platform in the Metaverse that aims to create a real sense of community and organisational culture, blending the on and offline office experience and challenging the way we think about digital collaboration.

Challenge

With a desire to extend Soma beyond an internal platform, Zigbang needed a name, strategy, brand and product experience for this new concept. It needed to challenge the way we think about the Metaverse and collaborative working culture, inspire businesses to partner with them and help set them on the course for international expansion.

Immersion

Naming and building the brand at the same time Zigbang built the product and experience meant we needed to work hand-in-hand with their team and prospective clients to ensure the brand delivered.

Despite the restrictions of lockdowns, we ran remote research with the internal team at Soma, from the CEO down, to deeply understand the product, cultural and brand ambitions. We audited the world of collaborative workspace tools to understand their strengths and weaknesses and we spoke to prospective clients around the world to gauge their interest and frustrations with current work-from-anywhere tools.

Brand strategy

Built on the strategic idea, ‘Take Up Space’, the Soma brand centres on its true difference in virtually replicating real world experience. It highlights the feeling of confidence and presence Soma creates, breaking down behaviours which would usually see people sit silent in the background of a Zoom or Google Hangout.

Brand expression

The new Soma brand highlights and distinguishes the best bits of the user experience. It builds trust whilst highlighting the product’s differences – virtual customisable office spaces which can be kept online all day with custom avatars for people to represent themselves, move around the space, chat with colleagues in the kitchen over a coffee and sit alongside them to collaborate. The brand system plays with this idea of space and dimension, rolling and rotating to reveal content and the experience.

Impact

The brand launch went above and beyond Zigbang’s expectations. By delivering a system which worked for the online and offline elements of the brand, we ensured mass acceptance and adoption of the brand by team members and enabled Soma’s launch internationally.

Since its launch in August 2021, users have spent over 4 million hours in Soma. They now have over 20,000 active users around the world.