Scribd: Crafting a Compelling Story for a Practical Product

With 2 million contributors and 170 million documents, Scribd is the PDF sharing tool everyone uses but not many remember. It hosts everything from manuals to studies on ancient botany. But its mission, centred on knowledge sharing and discovery, was getting lost in a functional approach. We anchored the new identity in a compelling story. Borrowing cues from the world of referencing, and rejecting our modern fixation on fast results and shallow takes, we positioned Scribd as Life’s Bibliographer, a brand that gives people much-needed context to deeply understand everyday life.