📷 rivian.com
Brand Storytelling
Connecting customer stories to external audiences
Rivian is an exciting, relatively new electric vehicle company. In 2022, I joined their brand team as senior manager of storytelling and social. In my year there, a major goal of mine in my year was to elevate the design of the Rivian Stories blog and social media posts. This happened in unison with Rivian’s production ramp, its joint venture with Amazon to produce electric delivery vans, and the company’s efforts to take meaningful steps to curb climate change.
The challenge: At the time of my hiring, Rivian was producing about four large content pieces a year. But when we didn’t have those large content pieces, posting on Rivian’s socials was sporadic at best. We needed content flowing in when we didn’t have production shoots or a budgets to create. to pull from. While we waited in the content desert for the next big quarterly rollout, we wondered how we could utilize owner-generated content we used in Instagram Stories and turn it into more developed pieces for our myriad channels more frequently.
The solution: After identifying owner content that aligned with Rivian’s overall narrative and goals, I would send an owner a set of questions, who would then send back a voice memo with the answers. Using their videos and photos, I would lay the interview audio over their own videos and photos to showcase the Rivian and their personal narratives. Some examples included the personal trainer who used his Rivian as a home gym on the go, or the off-the-grid couple who charged both their home and their Rivian using solar panels.
The result: By leveraging user-generated content from an extremely energized and prolific Rivian-owner fanbase, we immediately doubled our publishing cadence on social media. This additional influx of content helped our audiences grow by tapping into platforms strategies that favor video to still photography. The visual creative I design for Rivian’s earned media channels reached more than 1 million followers each week and helped the company sell new vehicles.
Other work samples from Rivian
Crafting stories around owner’s journeys wasn’t the only thing I was producing in my time at Rivian. I was also producing and designing pieces for company narratives to be posted on those same channels. Software updates, Ask Rivian (similar to a Reddit AMA), vehicle spotlights, updates from the assembly plant were common pieces I worked on. No matter what pieces I was working on, everything needed to be cohesive and feel as though they were both on brand and part of the same design system.