We’re talking in the office about a new logo and brand for the Student Loan Network and Edvisors Network. As you might have heard on Managing the Gray 12/26, to me, brand is about the story you can tell, about the emotions and feelings your brand evokes. To me, having been at this company for 3 1/2 years and employee #3, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s in our brand DNA. Here’s my version of the story so far.

In 1998, our CEO, Joe Cronin, took a major leap of faith and did the QYDJ (quit your day job) to start the Edvisors Network. He literally worked out of his attic getting the company set up, signing up with affiliate programs, trying to build and leverage relationships online. That attic, which I’ve personally been in, is tough to get into (very narrow, steep, circular stairs), hot in the summer, cold in the winter. But it’s the birthplace of our company.

Fast forward a couple of years. The company’s doing well enough and is busy enough that Joe hires Ross Mason, a well traveled Englishman, and moves to offices at 67 Coddington Street. The building’s kind of old and very odd, with a blend of dentists, tax associates, and a massage parlor (yes, THAT kind of massage parlor) in it. On the plus side, the windows open. On the down side, the mice and roaches are large enough to shoot rubber bands at and have a reasonable chance of hitting them. Edvisors branches out from just international student loans to international student loans, scholarships, and insurance, as well as Stafford Loans and PLUS loans.

Fast forward a couple more years to June 2003, when I sign on with the company. Joe explains at the start of my employment that the company’s slogan, mission, and vision statement is simply, “To Better Educate The World“. As he explained it, it’s not just about offering services to students, but actually helping them understand the education lifecycle, especially when it comes to financial aid. We share and teach as much, if not more, than we “sell”. There’s a great graphic floating around of the federal financial aid process and it looks like someone swallowed a copy of Visio and regurgitated it shortly thereafter.

This, I think, is one of the core tenets of the Edvisors Network and Student Loan Network: we know what the heck we’re doing.

The company’s growing fast in 2004, developing relationships with new lenders, and starting to offer even better student loan consolidation services through a new partner, Education Lending Group. We migrate to better servers, better web sites, better everything, and hire some more customer service help. We get bigger and bigger, and soon Coddington Street is full, so we find new offices on Cottage Avenue, a few blocks away.

There’s a funny tradition at the Edvisors Network from the earliest days: you have to put together your own desk. Office furniture always seems to come in a box with a woefully inadequate screwdriver, and your first day on the job inevitably involves assembling said desk. Everything about the company as a new employee, even today, is very much do-it-yourself. You learn by watching and doing, sitting alongside more experienced employees, and ultimately you learn the most by jumping into the fire and working in customer service. We try to ensure that everyone from the CEO down still spends some time in customer service or doing customer service tasks so that we can remain in touch with what our customers really want. I firmly believe in order to understand the customer, you have to actually talk to the customer. No amount of market research can substitute for this basic tenet.

So far, the conclusions I’ve drawn in doing a financial aid podcast, working here for three and a half years, and doing literally every job in the company at one point or another, are:

1. Our customers need a good experience. No mistake, the financial aid process is a complicated one, but not insurmountable. However, a good many of our customers have had bad experiences elsewhere, or at least experiences that were not satisfactory. We do our very best to pleasantly surprise them.

2. Our customers need high quality information. Google for scholarships. Go ahead. Millions of results. Google for any financial aid term, and you get millions of results, and a good many of them aren’t helpful. Like I said earlier, one of our core tenets is that we know what we’re doing. Everyone in the company, from the CEO down, stays on top of what’s happening in financial aid, and in most cases, blogs about it, too. If one of our customer service reps doesn’t have the answer for you immediately, they’ll go the extra mile and get you the answer, and call you back or email you back with the right answer, even if we can’t necessarily provide the service you need.

3. Our customers need money. We’re an education finance company that offers a spectrum of services, and we try our best to offer as many answers as possible for customers in one place, sort of like one stop shopping for education financial needs. If we can’t help, we will refer you to someone who can. Ultimately, we want to help you make education affordable.

4. As an employee here, the sky’s the limit. If you want to be a cog in a great machine, this probably isn’t the place for you. If you want to innovate, create, take chances (within reason, obviously), do creative and great things, and advance your career through invention and adaptation, this is the place for you. We work hard, we play hard, and then we work some more. Take, for example, one of our early interns, a girl in her senior year at Northeastern, Katie Dexter. Like everyone here, she paid her dues working in customer service but today is our director of federal loan origination. In any other student loan company, she’d probably have another decade before reaching that level.

So what’s the point of this very long blog entry? We’re going to be rebranding stuff. We’ll still be named the Edvisors Network, the Student Loan Network, the Financial Aid Podcast. That’s not going to change at all. What will change is that we’re going to get ourselves a new logo, probably some new color schemes, and the stuff that goes along with refining your brand, but to do that well, we need to understand our story first. What I ask of you is this – if you’ve had any experiences with the Student Loan Network and the Edvisors Network, please post your impressions of the company in the comments. I’m also including some sample logos of brands that have caught my eye in the next post.

What brands have you seen that have caught your eye, and more importantly, if you were in charge of branding the Student Loan Network, what approach would you take? Who are we, and how would you tell our story?