Aaron Shields was asked to comment on the conservatives brand and David Cameron’s efforts to modernise the party. This is an excerpt from the programme that appeared on Al Jazeera prior to the election in Great Britain.

Aaron adds: “The conservatives as still acting to shake off the image of Thatcher and all the archetypal notions that surrounded staunch conversative idealism. While ideologically and fiscally conservative, Cameron has been successfully moving the party closer to the centre. The cultural challenges must be enormous but he has sent clear signals of change well beyond adopting a new logo such as supporting more women MPs, more progressive policies and backing openly gay members. As in any culture, the patterns and habits will take continued action to change, but it appears that Cameron is on the right path. There are two challenges that remain. First, will the party be unified enough in time to lead a government? Second, will a coalition solution put too much strain on the newly emergent culture and tempt the conservatives to snap back into familiar and safe patterns of yesteryear?”

Eastern Europeans have been steeping dried fruit in hot water as a warming drink for centuries. We worked with Piramida in Kiev to modernise the drink into a handy tea-bag format for a cosmopolitan audience who is looking for an alternative to tea.

“The traditional drink’s folksy origins suggest an outdoor-oriented and wholesome character.  In the UK or US, these attributes would have likely translated into earthy illustrations and muted tones. But these memes look less attractive in Eastern Europe and a more urban approach was required” explains Niqui Harwood, designer on the project.

The selected design for the identity incorporates symbols from nature and fruit without feeling twee and traditional. The result is a set of ques that support the fruit and wholesome messages and appeals to the aspiring urbanite.

Time to catch up on new work with our teams. We’ve been working in the UK with Scott Wilson - a large engineering and design firm. Our teams have been working in Russia with the much loved national retailer Gloria Jeans. Finally, we have been working across three continents to re-brand the world’s largest Islamic bank, Al Baraka. There are the usual fun bits  and a new regular piece in the top Civil Branding posts we’ve written this season. Enjoy!

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Some engineering projects take your breath away. Scott Wilson is one of the oldest and most successful engineering companies in the UK. They employ 6,000 staff across 80 locations around the world.

The firm began as a partnership and has been transitioning into a PLC structure, shifting emphasis to customer-facing units. This shift required a new vision to help make sense of the change and continue along their trajectory to become a top five global engineering and design company.

Gillian Garner, partner at Brandinstinct adds ‘In visiting the various outfits and in facilitating several workshops, it became clear that team working has always been at the heart of the Scott Wilson story. The new vision is helping the former partner groups consolidate the units and work as bigger teams across geographies and disciplines.’

In anticipation of launching the new brand, we also evolved the brand identity to better support the new ambitious strategy. Print concepts were prepared and a new website is in the making.

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Over the past year, our team has been working with the inner circle of senior management at Al Baraka Bank to consolidate the largest number of Islamic banks in the world. The new bank unifies financial organisations across 12 markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

From our first meeting with Adnan Yousif, president and chief executive of the group, we agreed that a new brand will signal the continuing consolidation of the cultures, processes and products of the dozen different banks in the group.

The culture of the group management team is conciliatory, so the approach for consolidating the strategy of the group took on a highly consultative nature. Leaders from banks that had been operating successfully in markets for over thirty years needed to be brought into the vision development for the converged bank.

“The time and effort we spent listening, adapting and inching toward a shared vision paid off in spades when we needed to quickly implement the brand. Once agreement on strategy was reached across the twelve markets, we were able to implement at lightning speed” says Aaron Shields, partner.

One of the major dilemmas we tackled was bringing the 30 year old Islamic banking narrative up to date without diluting the original values that emanate from Islamic texts. Ethical and religious principles were what attracted staff and customers to the bank. Yet, no matter how much scholars argue over the details, all Islamic banks tend toward the same principles and therefore appear relatively undifferentiated to customers as a group. We needed to stand out from other Islamic banks, but being ‘more Islamic’ than other banks was not the solution.

‘Partnership’ was selected as the subject for the new narrative, both for its nod to participation-style values and for its forward-thinking notions. ‘Your Partner Bank’ resonated with both staff and customers. We found the new story to tell and management was eager to begin telling it.

In response, we created the launch campaigns and guided the production of all launch materials with local agencies. We continue to work with Al Baraka launching the brand in each of its twelve markets.

The new brand is being launched consecutively beginning with Bahrain, South Africa and Lebanon. Staff feel immense pride in the new brand and there has been a big increase in new dialogues with retail and commercial customers. In all, the brand has been a big success.

Thanks to the financial crisis, more conservative and more ethical banks like Islamic banks and cooperative banks are thriving. Al Baraka is taking advantage of this golden age by continuing to expand their presence in Asia and Europe.
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Founded in 1988, Gloria Jeans became the leader of kids and teenagers fashion apparel in Russia. They’ve grown rapidly, including during recessionary times, and have been active in global markets since 2003.

Key members of our team have a new-media background so we knew exactly how to launch the first version of the fashion website. We also emphasised transferring our knowledge to our client, believing it is crucial for brands to be able to manage their on-going dialogue and interaction with their audiences independently.

The first step was a concise planning stage, focusing on information architecture. We helped scale the team’s needs in a way that allowed a quick launch but also created a platform that could continually develop at the live-state once it’s on the Web.

We created a design that is consistent with the heritage of the brand but also seeks to take advantage of the opportunities the web platform provides to innovate and delight. The look & feel of the site is consistent, but it is designed to change seasonally to complement the changes of the “fast fashion” merchandise and to engage the brand’s many fans.

Finally, for the often dreaded development stage, we partnered with open source wizards Linnovate. The benefits of the open source platform, Drupal, enabled the creation of a highly scalable site with a powerful content management system at a fraction of the time and cost of similar endeavours taking the propriety software route. We’re excited to see where they take it.

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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 public 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.

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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.

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CNN speaks to Uri Baruchin about the rise of luxury brands in developing markets.