Wondrium
Wondrium (formerly known as the Great Courses Plus) is a direct descendant of The Great Courses (TGC), which began in the early 90s by selling VHS tapes of university-grade lectures to insatiable lifelong learners.
The team behind the service invited us to embark on a complete rebrand of the platform, including a new name, logo, tagline, voice, design aesthetic, and foundational brand strategy.
Role: Research • brand strategy • voice and tone development • copy • naming • brand guidelines
Home of the mind-blown moment
Wondrium's branding was designed to communicate a feeling — specifically, that feeling you get when you encounter a new idea. It’s what we call a “mind=blown” moment — that moment when you find out that breaking fingers used to be an ancient Olympic sport, or that fern spores have complex, drama-ridden social lives. It’s that thing that happens when you learn something new and a small part of your brain reverberates with joy, then promptly asks for seconds.
The Wondrium brand exists to remind people exactly what that moment feels like.
Research
During discovery, we interviewed stakeholders, conducted workshops, researched their competitors, and spent hours pouring through enough raw audience data to fill War and Peace.
We wrangled this data into a set of rather unorthodox audience personas. Rather than including standard information like age range, job titles, and income, we focused solely on uncovering their deepest (at times darkest) reasons for loving learning.
Validating a new brand strategy is tricky. It’s challenging to get hard data on an idea—how do you know that something is working until it’s out in the world? Our approach was to create two campaigns—one for each of the strategies we were testing—and to design questions that would gauge our audience’s comprehension of the idea, and their gut emotional response. To our delight, audience reacted much more strongly to our “mind-blown” reaction—their emotional response matching the tone of the campaign—as seen in the case of one hapless man who spit out his coffee at our black death poster.
