Canva’s new brand platform encourages employees to get creative at work

Canva has spent the 12 years since its founding educating consumers about how they can use the platform in their everyday lives, most pointedly with its three-year-old What Will You Design Today brand platform. 

In its second decade, Canva’s marketing is evolving to reach a broader set of professionals who use the platform every day in their jobs.

“It was quite important to start by building that product education in the U.S. market,” said Cat van der Werff, Canva’s executive creative director. “Now that we're at a good point with that, we're able to start to build a bigger brand moment and a brand movement — we felt like it was time to take a step into the brand-building space.”

That bigger step has manifested as Canva’s latest brand campaign, Love Your Work, revealed on Wednesday, which positions the design platform as a business-builder for companies and focuses on employee engagement as a powerful tool to increase productivity. It also aims to start a conversation about workplace culture and was inspired by a Gallup poll finding that only 23% of employees globally feel engaged by their job.

“We really want to make sure we're entering the workplace as a platform that both helps people to work faster and easier, but also more creatively and have a lot more fun along the journey,” said van der Werff.

The key differentiator for Canva is bringing fun to the workplace; through conversations with its current users, Canva found that those who use the platform at work feel more productive, creative and confident.

Love Your Work speaks to “audiences in the workplace who need visual communication to do their jobs really well every day,” noted van der Werff, including HR professionals tasked with engaging employees internally; sales teams, which need to personalize sales decks to each client; teachers needing creative ways to keep students interested and marketing teams rolling out brand campaigns.

Canva isn’t going after professional creatives with this campaign, which van der Werff noted was intentional: “Creativity doesn’t have to come from just professional creatives — I think we’re all born creative, so to be able to bring the creativity out in all these everyday people is a joy.”

The work was unscripted, she noted, with all the lines coming directly from users themselves. “We asked things like, ‘What are your goals? What are your ambitions?’” she said. “We think no one can tell the story of Canva better than the people who use it every day.”

The Love Your Work campaign was created in-house and will run through October 31 in the U.S., with paid media spanning streaming TV, out-of-home, digital display and video, streaming audio, podcasts and social media. OMD was Canva’s media agency.