Limitless, one of the largest property developers in the world, has just launched a new property at Cityscape in Dubai. The new property will be home to 220,000 residents near Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Al Wasl, which translates roughly to ‘the crossroads’, will be the largest development in the kingdom and has been born out of extensive research with the local community.
Our consultant on the engagement, Nick Ranger, adds that “it is important to appreciate how the specific traditions and culture of the country require a different approach to building new communities. Everything about the brand, from the name, to the positioning, to the design concepts and communications have been tested again and again. Usually, this process drives a lot of creativity out of a brand, leaving a ’safe’ product. Thankfully, we were able to continue driving creative back into the process at each stage so that ideas which were not culturally appropriate could be replaced with new, but equally creative designs to support the brand.”
‘Where life comes together’ is the new slogan for the brand and speaks to completeness of the development - being a destination unto itself. The illustrations bring this brand to life, connecting various amenities from pubic spaces that weave through the development.
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On September 25th, Uri Baruchin gave a presentation at the Strategic Branding forum in Romania. We used this opportunity to bring together some of our central ideas about how branding should be practiced in order to succeed in our rapidly changing world. This is an outline of the ideas the presentation touched upon…
Emerging practices in branding – a strategy for strategy
When asked to give a presentation with the title ‘the future of branding’ audiences usually expect to get examples from brands that innovate and point to the future. This time, we took a different approach. Instead of talking about branding as a noun, we decided to speak about it as a verb, about how branding is carried out. This is a look at emerging trends in branding as a practice. These are changes led by the people who lead branding programmes – usually branding agencies together with the clients who hire and work with them.
Our presentation looks at five aspects: methodology, relationship, culture, identity and engagement.
Aaron Shields and Sam Holmes will facilitating and exhibiting at Engage ‘08: the largest annual employee engagement event in the UK. We will be exhibiting in our big black inflatable igloo, so come by and grab a biscuit.
Gone are the days when each function inside a company focused on its own work in isolation to the rest. It is widely accepted that companies that work together to achieve a shared vision are more successful.
Branding has a vital and major role in getting your people working together towards a shared vision. A brand strategy is not just about marketing a product or service. It is a statement about the company, what it values and what it aims to achieve. A brand strategy has much wider application than communication & design activities. In order to get maximum benefit, a brand strategy needs to steer all customer touch points, including how employees and customers interact. + Read the rest of this entry
Budapest Bank, GE Money’s Hungarian member, has recently launched their new brand, with strategy, identity and a brand engagement programme.
When we met Budapest Bank, their main asset was a tradition of product excellence, however, this major strength was not working as hard as it could in the market. Instead of standing for a distinctive worldview, it came across as a functional and tactical stance, focused on short term offers.
We facilitated a brand strategy process that bloomed into an ambitious branding programme that has already made a significant impact on Budapest Bank’s business. An impact that became apparent even before the launch of the identity.
Unlike many projects where a lot of research needs to be carried out, when we started working with Budapest Bank they already had mountains of high-quality research about the perception and performance of their brand and competitor brands in the market. Our task was to distil meaning from this content and develop new insights. A thorough brand and market audit, combined with a series of internal workshops, painted a fascinating picture.
Pagani is a top 10 Italian pasta player globally and they are the number two European player in the Corporate B2B market. Pagani’s focus is creating tailored products for companies that either use them as an ingredient or sell them under a private label.
We admit it, at the beginning we’ve found the combination “B2B pasta” a little hard to get our heads around. Most of our immediate associations with Pasta brands were heavily consumer oriented. Indeed, when we visited the client at Europe’s largest food exhibition, we saw that the entire category was consumer oriented and, sadly, riddled with consumer clichés: Italian mamas, papas, smiling girls carrying bails of wheat in fields, you know the kind.
With a recent management overhaul, led by seasoned turn-around guru Peter Assembergs the company was facing a unique challenge. Pagani’s name is well known and recognised in the industry, but in an increasingly commoditised category and with a global crisis of rising prices of durum wheat, the challenge was demonstrating a real difference that highlights the company’s dedication to B2B manufacturing.
Our team have designed a new book on vodka to promote the Russian Standard brand. The 130-page book details the history of vodka in Russia and promotes old favourite drinks along with new imaginative ways to use vodka. Payam Sharifi, creative director at Russian Standard worked with our team as the editor and creative lead for the project managing the rollout across Europe and America. + Read the rest of this entry
Al Rajhi is a multi-billion-dollar, family-owned group of companies covering industries from banking to agriculture and heavy industry. Sheikh Suleiman Al Rajhi made the decision to enter into the property development market and we were asked to develop the marketing strategy and brand communications.
Last year, MCS Communications invited us to lead the design of a retail telecom concept for Romania. MCS Communications is a part of the Milomor Trade & Communication Group along with several other companies such as Hat, the official Romanian importer of Samsung mobile phones, and DTH Television, the digital television known as Boom TV. Their goal was to create a new kind of setting to sell products, services and accessories from the telecom, digital TV, photo products and services and multimedia markets. + Read the rest of this entry
