Let’s take a look at the renewal project of Fandom School.”
1Please share how HOHOHO started rebranding Fandom School.
Fandom School is a K-Pop platform company with the largest overseas fanbase. The platform organizes concerts, and plans and provides services for k-pop fan communities from home and abroad. With its rapid growth, Fandom School established a vision to offer an esteemed ranking system such as Billboard, and provide more services. HOHOHO began the rebranding process for Fandom School to build a strong brand identity that will help realize its clear vision.
2We want to hear about the scope of business of Fandom School.
HOHOHO studied what services Fandom School offers before creating a brand identity. We wanted to symbolize the concept in the first letter of its name. We built a system for Fandom School to offer more services as well. At the same time, HOHOHO established the UI design of Fandom School application’s functions and made the award ceremony video clip.
3There are a lot of services related to k-pop idols in the market. Is there a different design strategy for Fandom School?
solid fanbase is indispensable for a star. A number of existing services about the k-pop idols emphasize the stars, but Fandom School focuses more on relationship between a star and his or her fans. HOHOHO identified a visual concept and decided that the keyword is “fan’s attention.” The keyword symbolizes how a k-pop star exists thanks to continuous attention from fans. The attention is what creates a stage. We used one line from the letter “F” to make a curved shape that symbolizes fans looking towards a k-pop star, and showed how the attention extends further in the visual concept.
4Please tell us more about the brand identity of Fandom School.
The main color for brand identity is called “Fandom Red.” We picked red because we wanted to express how active and energetic a fandom can be, and our target market is in China. The main color became foundation for other colors and icons for the eleven main business units of Fandom School. We used a round-shaped typeface since the millennials are target customers; a round-shaped icon was designed to give a simple and trendy appearance.
5We have been told that a video clip was displayed at Times Square in New York City. Can you tell us more about this video?
There is a vote function in the Fandom School app. The video clip is about artists who ranked first in the app. In the video, k-pop stars talk about how they feel after ranking first; it was broadcast on large screens located at Times Square, the Reuters building, and the Nasdaq building at the same time.
6Tell us more about how the video clip was produced and broadcast.
The screens at Times Square are not all in the same size, so we had to create video clips for each screen. The Reuters building was more complex because there were eleven screens. In the Reuters building, there were four screens inside the building and seven were located outside the building. Moreover, the seven outdoor screens have different screen resolutions.
We had to broadcast the awarding ceremony for seven teams within 60 seconds, and the promotional video clip of Fandom School had to be added. To resolve this issue, we located the Fandom School logo video in the top of long screen. Then we inserted the written description of the awards in the middle. In the screen below in the middle, we broadcasted music videos of the artists who won award. In other screens, we displayed images of artists that won award. The video clips were played once during the day and once at night. We used firework effect at night so that it will look great with the landscape of Times Square. We intended to garner more attention and make it look like a celebration.
There were many artists who won awards: EXO for the best boy group, f(x) for the best girl group, Lai Kuan Lin for the best individual artist, Golden Child with the best new artist, TaeYeon for the best vocalist, SeungKwan for the best OST singer, and Super Junior won the grand prize. We used these artists’ music videos to create the video clip. We were dedicated to this project in order to make Fandom School more renowned and to introduce k-pop artists at Times Square which is an internationally famous place. On a side note, the biggest challenge in the project was working in early morning because of different time zones.
7Can you tell us about the renewed Fandom School app?
We organized the banner design guide within the app after analyzing trend. We found that a main poster or key color exists for vote function content. Entertainment content is more simple. Therefore, we needed to apply a strategy to cover different content with the new banner. In addition, it should have an excellent layout design to emphasize that the services can be trusted. For the banner, we needed to organize all images to look great because the images are background for typed information. Therefore, we needed a guideline to make the banner look more organized.
Second, we improved the UI for voting and ranking function, which is one of the most important functions. Moreover, we added the types of ranking. Third, we created a scenario for Fandom mission. A mission is given for users to watch a video ad get reward after watching. Lastly, we worked on the Fandom quiz function. Users can answer questions about k-pop artists and win reward in the app.
8The app renewal was carried out simultaneously with the rebranding process. What impact did it have?
In 2018, there were 1.2 million users from China and Korea, and 800 thousand users from other countries; the number of users worldwide was 2 million. After the renewal process, the number of users from China and Korea increased to 3.6 million, and the number of users from other countries increased to 2.4 million. Therefore, the overall number of users now stands at 6 million, marking three times of increase.
Fandom School expects to provide its services in Vietnam and Indonesia as well, meaning that there will be more users later. In addition, the scope of Fandom School business will expand as well. Fandom School award ceremony and its Youtube channel will be improved, and the Fandom mall will be launched. The app will be equipped with functionalities so that votes from Korea, China, and other countries will be synced real time, making it a truly global voting system.
In addition, there will be new functionalities such as Fandom news, Fandom quiz, Fandom go, and Fandom roulette, and various events and goods. Fandom School aims to improve content so that fans and k-pop artists can have a closer relationship; then it will lead to a lock-in effect, which means that more users will continue to utilize Fandom School.
