The LinkedIn Brand: Finding our Voice and Showing our Colors

More and more people are commenting to me that LinkedIn feels different. The sentiment is positive and they talk about seeing us more in the world, finding more value and inspiration in their experience on the platform, and feeling a warmer, friendlier vibe from our brand. And then last month, BrandZ named LinkedIn as one of the top 10 fastest growing brands in the U.S., growing over 41% in one year, adding over $6B in value. What’s happening is real, and we’re excited to tell the story.

Over the last 16 years, LinkedIn has grown into a community where more than 630 million professionals around the globe help one another navigate their professional lives and grow their careers, and where more than 30 million organizations connect to the talent and other organizations they need to grow their businesses. All these connections and actions create economic opportunity, the heart of LinkedIn’s purpose and our north star.

And while every LinkedIn employee knows connecting all professionals and organizations to create economic opportunity is why we exist, until recently, most of our members didn’t. Two years ago, we took on the challenge to expose what we knew internally to be true: LinkedIn as a diverse, inclusive, welcoming community of individuals, each with their own motivations and definitions of success, looking for help and to help, for inspiration and to inspire, to learn and to teach.

The outputs of a two-year brand evolution, code-named Project Otis, are what is being seen and felt in the world: a LinkedIn brand that reflects the humanity that we see everyday on our platform, the incredible examples of people and organizations coming together to help, support, and inspire one another, and the opportunity we believe we can create together.

We believe strongly that our brand is not marketing. It is every experience you have with us, in the pages you visit and the content you see when you land on the site, in our voice and on social handles, in the outdoor and TV advertising we started for the first time, in your interactions with our customer support and sales team, and in all the other places you experience us.

The new LinkedIn brand site we launched today provides a view into the tools we’ve provided all our internal teams and partners to tell our brand story. The tools enable all stewards of the LinkedIn brand to create the real, human experiences that are part of any career journey. LinkedIn’s Executive Creative Director Kevin Frank describes the creative journey in more detail.

And now we get to use the tools we’ve created to ensure that all professionals and organizations everywhere understand the power of the LinkedIn community to help them get where they want to go, or just tackle another week. Over the last year, the teams around the world have brought LinkedIn’s value proposition to life across our products, experiences and marketing. Just a few examples include:

• Our “In It Together” brand campaign has rolled out across the globe, showcasing our members - real people, not actors - helping one another reach their unique definitions of success and highlighting the more than 20 Million jobs available on the platform.
• Our social handles are engaging followers with thoughtful and timely conversations and links to interesting jobs and experiences.
• In cities across the UK, we set up The Linked Inn - a pub where job seekers and employers can connect in person.
• The 65+ Million people receiving our Daily Rundown, one of the world’s largest business publications, are getting critical insights and different viewpoints you might not otherwise see. And features like #HowIGotHere tell real stories of members with non-traditional roles and paths.
• Our LinkedIn Learning library, with 60+ new courses added every week, is enabling professionals to acquire the skills they need to further their careers and helping organizations to address their skills gaps.
• We’ve also started the journey to create a platform that enables accessible experiences for everyone. You can add descriptions on images you upload to the feed, in groups, and on Company Pages and add closed captioning to videos.
• Companies and organizations, who are key partners in our ecosystem, are using new video and image formats in their feeds, profiles, groups and Company Pages to help people better understand who they are. And a new Help Wanted feature is helping small businesses to connect with talent quickly and easily.
• And that’s just a sample. We still have a long way to go, but we’re energized by the progress we're making every day.

And while we’re sharing our evolution, what is most inspiring is not what has changed, but what hasn’t. And that is the core vision of who we are and what we want to be, a community creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. At the heart of LinkedIn is the belief in the power of people coming together to create opportunity. As we move forward, that core value is as strong and resilient as ever and our brand evolution is ensuring a much broader audience recognizes the power of the LinkedIn community to help them, no matter where they are or where they want to go.