Website development for a Russian GR market player: Baikal Lobridge
Client:
Context: Baikal Lobridge is a trailblazer in the Russian Government Relations (GR) and Public Affairs market.
The Government Relations (GR) and lobbying market in Russia is evolving in the absence of any formalized rules or unified standards. Yet, that is exactly where companies that have spent years building a dialogue between businesses and the government, protecting the interests of major corporations, interpreting regulations and translating policy into the language of business risks and opportunities, operate.
In recent years, GR stopped being a support function and became a strategic tool, especially amid unstable regulation and high sensitivity toward policy decisions. For years, Baikal Lobridge has been shaping this market, developing professional practices, industry dialogue, and operational standards in the GR and public affairs sector.
Yet the industry is facing a systemic problem: it is complex, overloaded with professional jargon and largely closed off to the uninitiated. Without a strong brand and a flexible digital tool, even top-level expertise will remain unnoticed.
Depot's objective was to ensure the corporate brand reflected this growth and met international standards, highlighting expertise related to handling complex regulatory and legal agendas, a systematic approach to analysis, the development of digital tools, and the ability to turn political risks into clear, actionable business solutions, including crisis communications for a digital environment.
When they came to Depot, Baikal Lobridge's existing positioning failed to reflect the true scale of its business. In reality, the company was already a strategic partner to the market's largest players, but its brand did nothing to communicate that status.
Based on ambitious market research and comprehensive rebranding, the Depot team came up with a key insight, updated the positioning, and developed a new design system for the brand. The digital component, meaning the brand's key digital media, its corporate website, was a point of special focus.
You can learn more about Baikal Lobridge strategy and positioning, naming, brand style and legend from a separate case.Objective:
After the rebranding and the visual system update, the next step was developing the website, the brand's key communication channel. It should have fulfilled multiple functions at once: act as a corporate website, a lead generation tool, a company presentation platform, a partner knowledge base and a case portfolio.
On top of that, the website (together with Telegram) became an important content distribution channel: Baikal Lobridge has its own media, analytical reports and research that need a convenient and clear digital environment.Solution:
The development process was all-encompassing: we created a fully-fledged digital communication platform instead of just a standard corporate website. At the UX design stage, we mapped key user scenarios for different audiences: corporate clients, partners, and the professional community. That allowed us to build clear navigation through complex industry content and reduce the cognitive load related to handling analytics.
We adapted the visual style for the new brand identity and scaled it to all contact points. Depot formulated a clear and concise description of Baikal Lobridge's role as the first systemic GR partner. That idea is reaffirmed within the brand platform through the metaphor of a “bridge between business and the state,” and this very metaphor is what our UX/UI solutions were built around.
As a result, the website became a high-tech modular platform where the dynamics and identity elements naturally continue their development within its structure, animation, and interaction scenarios.
Research
At that stage, the Depot team relied on the expertise of our strategists who provided an in-depth market study, including competitive analysis and an audit of the current brand.
Since the government relations and lobbying market in Russia is largely shaped by the efforts of companies like Baikal Lobridge, we analyzed all types of players: Russian and foreign, large and small, while also not forgetting about indirect competitors in adjacent categories, like PR and legal consulting. We studied corporate websites, communication tones, digital channels and content produced by all players in the category.
The result was a clear picture of the future website's structure, key user scenarios, and the unique advantages offered by Baikal Lobridge.
Historically, digital environments in the GR sector have been strictly transactional, with websites functioning merely as information sources and rarely used to generate reputation, expertise or a public position. We focused on every tier of the brand pyramid when developing the website, to ensure that our UX solutions matched the updated brand positioning and effectively communicated the company's values to every target audience.Prototyping
We started with prototyping key pages in line with rebranding objectives and the customer's business goals. We accounted for all the latest digital trends, benchmarks from our Western peers and best practices from indirect competitors in PR and legal consulting industries.
The website was designed as a convenient and functional platform that was also user-friendly, which is critically important in a category with lots of complex content. We mapped user flows in detail, shaping the platform's content architecture and master page templates based on them.
Concepting
At the concepting stage, we designed the website's design concept and the logic of brand visual codes' and identity elements' use that served as the basis for the final design system.
GR content is overloaded with complex terms and contexts that a user can get lost in easily. As a result, we structured the website so that both its interface and content would guide users incrementally from a high-level overview of the situation toward specific, actionable business solutions.
Design and UI-kit
Once our concept was approved, we developed a design system containing over 20 master page layouts, including, among others: About Us, Mission & Values, Partners & Team, Careers, News, Solutions, Cases & Clients, HR, the GR Ecosystem, the GR School, Media & Analytics, Research and Reports.
We put the visual highlight on real people: teams and faces rather than the generic, abstract corporate imagery. That enabled us to design an honest, open and transparent visual language.
The UI kit and the layout template system make it possible to scale the website, launch new sections and handle the content without compromising on quality or visual consistency.
Make-up
At the make-up stage, we put a special focus on adaptability, ensuring that the website would render correctly across all device types and screens. Baikal Lobridge became a category benchmark by demonstrating that you can design a bold, flexible and memorable visual language in a conservative industry.
We use lightweight animation not as decoration, but as a tool that lowers the entry barrier to the complex content and makes analytics more digestible.
Our partnership with Depot was structured as full-fledged strategic effort, not just a surface-level visual update.
The result was the Baikal Lobridge brand: systemic, coherent and mature. The new name and identity strengthened our role as a transparent and reliable partner for businesses and the government, while preserving recognition for current clients and opening opportunities for growth and international positioning
Eduard Voytenko, CEO, Baikal Lobridge
Result
The Baikal Lobridge rebranding resulted in a cohesive brand system that brought together a strategy, a verbal platform, a visual identity and the brand's key digital medium, its website. For the GR industry, that is a rare example of a stylish, bold and scalable digital solution.
The new naming and the “first systemic GR partner” formula provide a clear and understandable explanation of the company's market role: a reliable partner that follows transparent rules to build interactions between businesses and the government. The updated strategy, positioning, legend and brand identity brought the isolated business functions, from analytics and consulting to conferences and educational initiatives, together into a cohesive system.
That project became an example of how, in a conservative GR environment, a website can work not as a formality, but as a full-fledged digital brand ecosystem, setting a new visual and communication benchmark for the industry. In a digital environment, we shifted the focus from services and cases to people and solutions, making the website more human and trust-inspiring.
Many visual techniques we used are tried-and-true, classic solutions of modern web design that, nevertheless, look fresh and even sometimes bold in the GR sector. Our goal was not to stun, but to reveal the brand values and attributes through the website's content and interface in an understandable, consistent way. We did not just develop the website, but created a digital soul of the brand in the form of its key medium. That is how digital branding works today.
Dmitry Eremeev, digital director, Depot
Together with Baikal Lobridge, Depot sets new digital design standards for the Government Relations industry, even where digital has historically been underdeveloped, and branding was not a point of focus at all.
Agency team:
Farkhad Kuchkarov, Strategy & Development Director
Anastasia Kharuk, New Business Development Director
Galina Evdokimova, Verbal Communications Director,
Semyon Shatylo, Creative Director
Aleksandra Shchit, Creative Director, ID Function
Polina Sergeeva, Creative Director, ID Function
Andrey Anisimov, Art Director
Dmitry Eremeev, Digital Director
Anna Melnik, Designer
Viktor Glagolev, Designer
Rustam Fayzrakhmanov, Technical Designer
Aleksandr Izraylev, Strategist
Aleksandra Chebotareva, Copywriter
Olga Mesyatseva, Project Manager
Svetlana Malinskaya, Director, Account Management
Irina Smirnova, New Business Senior Manager
Stasya Vasilenko, PR Manager
Client team:
Eduard Voytenko, CEO
Sofia Strakhova, Executive Director
Laura Mollaeva, Head, Strategy & Product Development Team
Marina Efremova, Layout Designer
