NestAway is India's largest “Managed Home Rental Network” attempting to provide better rental solutions via design & technology and was started in 2015 in Bengaluru. Rental market in India is a highly unorganized one with several pain points. Nestaway aims at making moving to a new city less painful by not just helping bridge the trust gap but also providing the urban migrant lot more to look forward to in the new city. The rebranding exercise was a step in Nestaway’s journey of evolution from being perceived as a facilitator/broker to being seen as a host who makes newcomers feel at home in a new city. The brief was to rethink the brand identity system to be omnipresent, instantly recognizable relatable by the way it is applied across platforms and media types. Budget: 720000USD. Project scale and volume: Nestaway manages over 35,000 homes across 14, and houses over 65,000 tenants.

Nestaway aims to be a game-changer in the rental market by looking at ‘homes beyond houses’ with their open policies of ‘no discrimination’ and ‘no city is a stranger’. Their mission was to ease the process of finding homes and living in a new city. Nestaway not only helps find and rent homes of choice across Indian cities but also assists with move-in, provides home maintenance services from cleaning, damages to rent payment & even move-out. Nestaway emphasizes on making the experience of moving to a new city a positive one, by going beyond and enabling connections, activities and easy city navigation.

Target audience: Young Urban Migrants, age 18 to 35 - could be students, first jobbers, corporates, artists. HouseOwners, age 30 to 55 - corporates & NRI.

The idea was to build a brand on adoption rather than identity that needs to be marketed. We thought what if we gave our community fun, cool way to express themselves. Keeping the tone simple, direct, confident and young, we created icons that reflect a vibrant brand that could deliver across the board. Increasingly, social media engagements define our personal space and ideas of expression. The ‘Voice Box’ container evolved as a powerful conversational platform. It is a flexible icon, which can stretch in different directions to hold messages. The branding was brought alive with merchandise, things one could own & help them in a new city like fridge magnets, house stickers and city maps. We introduced comic characters in the container form, to carry on conversations or give commentary. We created a bunch of cute GIFs & Instagram icons with our characters that youngsters could use & share

The rebranding significantly changed how the brand was perceived both within & outside the organization. The brand immediately stands out & helps establish that we are more than just housing. The rebranded website resulted in conversions increasing by 20% and bounce rate reducing by 40% - indicating much higher interest levels of the consumers. Our GIFs got over 6 million completely organic views, positive sentiment & engagement on our social media went up by 300% - showing high adoption of the brand by the consumers. Also the consistency across mediums helped improve brand experience significantly - our google reviews went up from 2.41 to 3.7. Also of this resulted in 100% jump in sales from like to like period last year. We also launched social platforms like the community app, music labs & startup house that reinforced the brand's belief of giving the urban migrants more than just a home.