Like a lot of things in the marketing world, opinions on design and advertising are very often subjective. If you ask someone’s opinion on an idea or concept, you often find their opinion is based on whether or not they have a personal affinity with it – is it similar to things they like and have done in the past? Does it appeal to the consumer type that person fits into? Very rarely however do you get an objective opinion on a design i.e. does this piece of work answer the brief? Have you researched the stated target audience and found out what they think?

When it comes to branding, this issue can go even deeper than it does just with design because these subjective opinions and ideals go right to the very core of what a company is about. If these things are wrong at the start then the project you’re working on could be fatally flawed before you even begin.

Let me give you an example:

Imagine a company came to us looking to rebrand their business. As we do on all branding projects, we would begin by asking lots of questions about who their customers are – demographic profiles, likes, dislikes, which other brands they buy from, where they shop, what they do in their spare time, what makes them tick, average customer spend etc.

When you ask these questions you will get one of 2 types of answers. The first answers will come from the clients you should be listening to because they are objective answers. They will either refer to actual information they have on who their customers are based on research and sales data, or they will just be in tune to who their customers are having run the customer facing side of the business for some time. Their answers will always be quantifiable in some way and you will get a sense of true objectiveness.

The second types of answers will come from the clients you’ve got too watch out for because their answers will be more subjective. You can tell because many of the answers are not backed up with anything more than vague anecdotal evidence. More important than that though you will notice that the client doesn’t tell you who their customers and target audience ARE but who they WANT THEM TO BE.

Even more important than that is that, in the vast majority of cases, the client will want their customers to be like them. They will project their upbringing, economic background, cultural attitudes and buying habits onto their target customer – even if the product or service they’re offering actually fits a completely different customer profile.

So imagine a company was selling a consumer good that they wanted to create a new brand for. Also imagine the product was selling in a competitive market place where there are a number of different products and price points ranging from lower-end, through to premium, through to extreme luxury.

Let’s say this product fitted into the lower end of the market – it was relatively cheap to make, had low price points, used fairly low-end materials and components and would probably be sold in department stores such as TG Hughes or BHS.

Also imagine that your client doesn’t shop in BHS and TJ Hughes, they shop in John Lewis or Harvey Nichols. They are from a relatively high socio-economic background. A certain type of advertising appeals to them and they’re exposed to it in media such as Country Living Magazine or the Telegraph. You’re more likely to find them at the ballet than you are at McDonalds tucking into a Big Mac!

So if you ask that client who their customers and target customers are they’ll probably start telling you they shop in John Lewis, are from an ABC1 socio-economic background, pay attention to adverts they see in the Telegraph or Country Living magazine and often attend the ballet!

There are 2 reasons why this happens:

• The first reason is that it’s common for people to project an image of their customers to be just like them. Most of us surround ourselves with people are just like us – our friends and acquaintances have similar opinions, like similar things and are pretty likely to come from a similar socio-economic background to ourselves. Because of this it’s actually very difficult for anyone to truly put themselves into someone else’s shoes and understand what their wants and needs from a product or service might be.

• Secondly it’s also common for brand owners to be ‘aspirational’ when it comes to their business – they want to be seen as premium even if their product or service doesn’t suit this brand type and even though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with selling a ‘lower-end’ product.

But what can I do to fix this?

I suppose that depends what your relationship with your client is like. If you have a relationship where you as the agency are expected to challenge your client’s assumptions then it’s all about convincing the client round to your objective way of thinking with good reasoning. If you don’t have that kind of relationship and your client can’t be convinced then you can either create what they want you to even though you know it won’t be effective OR walk away.

A tough decision that I’ll leave up to you!

Corporate brand design and identity is the starting point for everything in business. It is the first thing a company needs to create before... well, anything! Without a brand... without a logo... without an identity you are nothing!

Brand identity is one of the most important parts of a good business – it helps people get to know you, it communicates so much more than just a name, and, if your branding looks disorganised, dull, frantic or indeed anything negative then this will be reflected on your company the second a potential customer sets eyes on your brand.

When you consider that a website has 3 seconds to capture the interest of an average visitor before they go elsewhere, branding can be said to be even more important for an online business! So when it came to creating the brand for VanLeasingQuotes.com we knew we had to get it right.

Where to start?

When creating a brand we start off by doing 4 things – reviewing the initial brief, speaking to the client, reviewing the competition and reviewing the ‘non-competition'.

The initial brief is a document we refer back to throughout the process. In this case it reminded us that VanLeasingQuotes.com want to create some new and different – this will have a bearing on the brand identity concept.

The client is also a great place to start because, not only do we want to create something that they buy into, but they also have good knowledge of their marketplace and any things to definitely avoid. In this case the team at VanLeasingQuotes.com were really keen to let us take the reigns and they were keen we didn’t get tied down by their perception of what might work and what might not (it’s great to get a client like this who really just wants us to flex our creative muscle!)

Reviewing the competition is a key part in the initial process because it lets us see what our brand will be up against. When we reviewed the competition in this case, we found that there wasn’t much out there that was particularly strong.  Most competitor websites made the mistake of trying to draw attention and say too many things at once (the end result looking a bit messy).

Reviewing the non-competition is a great way of finding inspiration from other industry sectors and using it in a new place. In the case of VanLeasingQuotes.com we found that their competition wasn’t strong so we knew we wanted to create a brand that stood out a represented something completely new.  We wanted to create a brand that represented a clean, fresh, approachable and easy-to-use website. One of the major industry sectors we looked at was price comparison websites – these sites are really easy-to-use and the best of these companies have great brand identities – we took inspiration from this.

Brand Concepting

This is where I start to get down some ideas. I’ll work with Ryan initially to think about the kind of look we want to create and we’ll sketch down some shapes and general sketches. After that I go away and spend a lot of time trying lots of different things (some I quickly abandon!) before coming back with 3 or 4 solid concepts for discussion. We all review this internally and there’s usually a couple of days of reviewing and tweaking each concept before we present 2 or 3 to the client. In this case we went back to the client with 2 concepts – both we felt were really strong.

It’s not just the logo we create at this stage, we also think about use of colour, font and language and how this would be used across the whole site.  

Client Approval

Presenting a new brand identity concept to a client is always a bit nerve racking – after spending a lot of time and energy going down a certain route with a brand that you really like, you just hope to god that they like it too! In this case they quickly chose one of our concepts and the process was fairly painless from here – just a couple of minor tweaks.

The Final Brand Concept:

Well this is the logo, what do you think? Hopefully you agree that we’ve created exactly what we set out to – a clean, fresh and approachable brand identity. Although we can’t show you the full brand manual we created for VanLeasingQuotes.com, the new logo is just one part of the overall look. We’ve also chosen corporate colours and fonts as well as developing how we will use language and tone across the new website. So this initial branding stage will really inform everything else we do when creating an online business for VanLeasingQuotes.com – it will give us a clear guideline on where to go with the look and feel of the website and the marketing material to follow after that.

It’s Ryan next week on keyword analysis and website planning.

Speak to you soon!

ARE YOU ALWAYS ON? YOUR BRAND IS!

Ok so it’s a bit of a buzz phrase in the marketing world at the moment but “always on” marketing is here to stay and it has implications for your business.

WHAT IS ALWAYS ON MARKETING?

It does what in says on the tin in this case – it’s the realisation that, no matter what business you’re in, your brand is always in the limelight being consumed, perceived and judged by the public.

The advent and continually larger part that social media has to play in our lives is one of the major reasons for this and, perhaps ironically, it’s the effective use of these same social media tools that can help your business react to the always on brand culture.

LET ME GIVE YOU A REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE OF HOW THIS APPLIES TO A BUSINESS IN THE RESTAURANT SECTOR (A PARTICULARLY AFFECTED INDUSTRY OF THE ALWAYS ON BRAND):

I went to Pizza Express on Sunday evening and, in comparison to the usual experience I’ve had many times before at this restaurant, this time the service was poor and in general not what I’ve come to expect from Pizza Express.

I’ll not go in to too much detail but it took a long time for our meals to arrive, staff appeared to be too busy cleaning the restaurant after a busy weekend rather than serving customers, our waitress seemed to be avoiding us whenever possible and at the end of the meal there was a mix up with a special offer we were supposed to receive because of unclear and unspecific descriptions on the promotional flyer. Overall it wasn’t a great experience.

If this had happened to me, even 5 years ago, I may have told a couple of friends, family and work colleagues about the experience but that would have been it. That in itself wouldn’t have been great for Pizza Express but they’d probably love to go back to those days now if they could!

Think about what many do if they have a bad experience with a brand in today’s world. Well I’m blogging about it here for a start so that gives you a clue…

Consumers go online and share their experiences (often with people they don’t even know!)

We all now have a raft of different social media platforms at our fingertips that we use to share and connect with different groups of people. Lets look at what I could have done on Sunday evening after my experience at Pizza Express:

Post a status update on my Facebook page giving a much wider audience of 350 of my close and, not so close, friends and associates a description of the experience I’d just had. Now that’s a whole lot more people than I could have told before Facebook!

Tweet to all my contacts a (very short!) description of my experience and tag Pizza Express’ Twitter account in the post so that anyone following their profile could find out about my experience. Probably resulting in 1000’s of people viewing the tweet.

Go on to Trip Advisor, write a review and rate my experience at this particular Pizza Express for everyone to see. So next time someone in my area is thinking of visiting a Pizza Express they may very well have a quick look on Trip Advisor and decide otherwise.

Now this is just 3 of the many social networking tools and methods I could have used to tell others about my experience but it goes to show the reach and power I have as a consumer to tell others about my experience.

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT HOW A BUSINESS SHOULD REACT?

Firstly, although rather cliché, it’s better to be pro-active than to be reacting all the time. A good brand will focus on providing the highest level of service whenever possible to minimise the amount of bad experiences that a customer has with them. I didn’t actually do any of the above after my experience because, having been to Pizza Express at least 5 or 6 times this year I understood that their service is usually a lot better and I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

There is an element of reacting involved though and what the advent of social media means for brands is that consumers expectations of reaction times when something does go wrong are much shorter than they used to be – hence the ‘always on’ tag. 

Whether you run a restaurant and have had a bad night, run a manufacturing business that’s run into a bit of a PR disaster, or run a service-based B2B business and have received a customer complaint, the customer now expects an almost instant reaction.

Ok, so having someone scouring social media websites and responding to customer complaints 24 hours isn’t practical for most businesses but effective use of social media tools to engage with your audience and a more effective approach to reacting to situations can go a long way.

APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TIMES

Although I didn’t go on a social media tirade against Pizza Express after Sunday evening, I did send a complaint email through their website just to see how long it took them to get back to me and to judge how this matched up with my expectations of a reasonable timescale.

That was on Monday morning and I still haven’t received anything as of yet, which is around 72 hours as I publish this post. To be honest, I was expecting to receive something the same day but would have accepted anything up to 24 hours.

So really, Pizza Express has gone down in my estimations, possibly in yours having read this and I could have reached a whole lot more people as I’ve talked about above.

Would I go back? I think I’ll give them one more chance since there American Hot pizza is so good!

Think about how ‘always on’ will affect your business and if you need any further advice give us a call.

Since branding and rebranding are a big part of what we do, we thought we'd show you an example of a logo we recently created for a company called Blimey! Loans.






In this logo Blimey! is the brand. The use of lower-case font, choice of typeface and bold colour give the brand a young, fresh and  approachable look whilst still maintaining a professional, sleek and corporate feel at the same time.
This logo is designed to last – it won’t date quickly. 

The way in which the word ‘loans’ is separated into a rounded grey shape still keeps loans as a prominent feature but tones it down somewhat to make the Blimey! brand really stand out.

Over time if Blimey! diversify into other areas then the text inside the shape would change accordingly – continually building on the brand.

So as you can see there is a reason for everything when designing a logo from the use of colour and shape to considering the future of a company's development.

What do you think?