Pheaa Rebrand
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Description
The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) was exploring rebranding to revive the current place within the student loan industry while expanding new business opportunities outside of the student loan industry. User interviews and tests were conducted to discover problems, pain points, and customer satisfaction.
Problems & Pain Points
- 95% of users didn’t know how to pronounce the acronym PHEAA (Fee Ah) or what it means
- The users who pronounced PHEAA correctly were from Pennsylvania
- These users also had an impression that PHEAA isn’t honest with customers
- Users weren’t fully aware that PHEAA had three different brands that dealt with student loans
Process
We conducted whiteboarding sessions, journey maps, focus groups, and A/B testing to guide the direction to make all PHEAA’s student loan brands into one cohesive unit. We also explored making PHEAA into a pronounceable word rather than users saying P.H.E.A.A.
Solutions
- The team changed PHEAA to Pheaa after additional user testing
- Pheaa remained a unique word for SEO and still kept its legacy definition but changing the case solved mispronouncing the name by 87.2%
- We developed new branding to show the new direction of the agency
- We were able to merge the other student loan brands (AES and FedLoan) into the Pheaa brand while keeping them in their respected criteria (Pheaa - Private Student Loans, Pheaa - Federal Student Loans
- PHEAA’s additional business outside of the student loan industry will be under a new brand name
Conclusion
PHEAA's rebrand was postponed, and all of the research was used to establish a new brand that’s strictly within the Fintech/IT industry called Avereo.
