Image showing thr brand work for Merj

Merj

Engineering advantage

Building a new brand strategy, identity and website for Merj's next stage of growth

Founded in 2015, Merj is an independent SEO and AI search consultancy. They help enterprise brands make their platforms discoverable by search engines, AI answer engines and customers. Combining technical SEO, data engineering and platform engineering, their consultants and engineers embed with client teams to find what’s broken and ship the fix, whether that means writing code, building data pipelines or deploying changes at the edge. Advice is where most traditional agencies stop but it’s where Merj starts.

Services Delivered

  • Brand identity
  • Brand strategy
  • Guidelines
  • UI
  • Websites & Apps

Felina Tan - Director, Growth & Leadership, Merj

We'd outgrown our brand. FutureKings delivered a strategy, identity and website design that explain what Merj does in seconds. It gave us the confidence to show up bigger, starting with our first major event, where the new brand did a lot of the talking for us.

In its first decade, Merj grew through its reputation and word-of-mouth referrals, working with brands such as Expedia Group, Warner Bros. Discovery and John Lewis Partnership. However, its brand, last refreshed in 2018, hadn’t kept pace with the business and had become inconsistent.

Our brief was to create a brand and website that reflected Merj’s position at the intersection of search, data and digital infrastructure, at a time when AI search is changing how enterprise brands are found.

We began with our What? Why? How? workshop with Merj’s leadership team, exploring what the business does, why it does it and how, alongside a competitor audit and a deep dive into customer personas. Three key insights emerged:

  • Merj are doers. The team loves getting its hands dirty. They don’t stop at diagnosing issues or spotting opportunities; they implement and report on them.
  • Merj are partners. The team embed themselves in clients’ businesses, working alongside their engineering, product and marketing teams, so clients gain a partner rather than simply a supplier.
  • Merj are early. Their grasp of new technologies, from edge computing to agentic infrastructure, lets the team think differently from competitors and act on opportunities others hadn’t yet spotted.

We developed a brand platform centred on Merj’s ability to bring together the right data, systems and people to create measurable performance for its clients. We defined it as ‘Engineering advantage’.

The identity needed to reassure enterprise brands that Merj has real depth in technical SEO, AI search and data engineering. To set Merj apart from competitors, we built it around simplicity: bold, direct language and a confident typographic style designed to cut through.

To activate the brand, we designed Merj’s new website and worked with Secret Studio Club to build it. After a kick-off workshop to agree on the scope and key templates, we developed wireframes and high-fidelity designs in Figma, supported by a UI toolkit and component library. Together, these form a responsive design system that shows the team how to apply the identity across digital channels, from the homepage and service pages to the blog, case studies and gated content.

The first major chance to share the brand was Compound ’26, the event Merj co-hosted with Profound for 100 senior leaders in SEO, AEO and engineering. To make the most of it, we worked with the team on a range of branded materials, including banners, notebooks, socks and business cards.