An Ode to Small Business with The New York Time
As part of Square’s brand campaign, The Shape of Things to Come, we partnered with The New York Times to produce an interactive digital experience and print spread in the Sunday Times that showed what the future looked like for real small business owners. Published in February, amongst an onslaught of new year messaging — and nearly a year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — we broke through by taking an honest look at what it meant to run a business in 2021.
We cast a diverse set of small business owners and, through original research and interviews, told the stories of the challenges they faced and how they felt about the future. The data and stories were used to create a manifesto, positioning Square as an empathetic partner for entrepreneurs’ next phase of business.
This brand storytelling effectively communicated Square’s values while also supporting brand and product awareness. An Ode to Small Business led to double digit lift in the perception that Square “has a point of view with which I tend to agree with” and in unaided awareness.
Print spread
Portraits of the entrepreneurs
Interactive manifesto
An entrepreneur's story