Stand Out From the Crowd
So they must be doing something right... right !? Well I have spent most of my creative life working with some of the biggest brands and retailers, all of whom have well established brand identities and guidelines, most of which as a creative you spend your time working within and even defending their brand.
So it has been interesting working with one new client over the past 4 months, as although they are a family run business, establish over 40 years ago, and clearly have been doing some of the basics very well, as it is no small achievement to reach 4 decades doing the same thing in this world !
However, from my point of view, I was brought in as the company realised that it was time to "create an identity"... from scratch !
The starting point, was for me to ask them to "show me what you got"... and what they had been using was a total mess in all honesty, from a branding and marketing point of view. Several sorts of logos, which all looked like they were done in Word Art, a website which could have been done by my daughter as part of her Primary School project, and yes we havent even got onto Social Media ! There was a Twitter account, there was a facebook page but you can imagine, nothing from the business cards, printed material, online presence or business premises bore any resemblance to each other.
So it has been an exciting challenge from my side, building a new brand and identity look and feel which offers consistency and to all aspects of the business. A rare treat for me to be involved from the ground upwards, rather than working with well established properties. The family business has continued to trade, but we quickly reworked logos, fonts, icons, and colour palette... right through to social media tone of voice and have already run 3 separate online marketing campaigns.
As I have said before, with marketing [especially online marketing] the proof is in the pudding. I cant fudge or cheat the online numbers, they are what they are. The client can see for themselves if things are working or not, as you can see Twitter followers grown, posts get more engagement and people interacting with your marketing.
In just 4 months we increased their Facebook Page by 476% , and in the same period Twitter followers increased by 1071%.
We let the business carry on doing what they did best, after all they have been doing it for 40 years, but we like to think we know what we are doing, so we simply ask them to trust us a little, enjoy the ride, be involved at all stages, but to allow us to do something creative to engage with their market audience.
In the end it doesn't matter too much if you are trying to sell toilet rolls or designer watches, the key to them all is understanding shoppers and consumers, what they want, what they are looking for, and then putting the proposition there for them to quickly, easily and in a fun way engage with it, then we can all sell something they want !
Phillip Holloway