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.
+ Read the rest of this entry
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.
+ Read the rest of this entry
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.
+ Read the rest of this entry
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
By: Ian Dunlop
Beginning my marketing career at Bass in the UK, before moving to the communications side, then brand strategy, and working throughout Europe and the Far East, I was always curious as to why some companies could produce successful brands and others seemingly could not. My journey through the disciplines has produced some interesting observations.
If you ask anyone in the brand communications industry as to what constitutes a brand they will likely respond that it is a blend of rational and emotional perceptions of a product or service in the minds of loyal consumers. At any one moment in time this would seem to be true. There was, after all, the famous case of Persil soap powder remaining brand leader in its category long after the introduction of infinitely more effective detergents. The accepted rationale for this is that the perception of female users was that Persil signalled that they were “caring mothers”, and this was a much more compelling brand attribute than product efficacy alone.
+ Read the rest of this entry
17 June 2008, Riyadh Chamber of Commerce
The Riyadh Chamber of Commerce is hosting an intimate seminar on the future of brand development in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Ian Dunlop, consultant at Brandinstinct explored five trends in brand development observed around the globe.
The seminar was sponsored by Enshaa Holdings
Saffronart is the leading auction house worldwide for Indian modern and contemporary art. They are one of only a handful of auctioneers worldwide to crack the online auction model. With auction sales and additional fixed-price sales, Saffronart outperforms auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s in its categories.
A young, dynamic company it is reinventing the rules of the game for its category, using the net to introduce a new degree of information transparency. If art is known for its transformative powers, Saffronart is about bringing this creative energy to the business of Art. Growing as a global business the company was looking for a brand that will differentiate it from the competition as well as position it firmly as a global brand.
+ Read the rest of this entry
By: Uri Baruchin
The narrative aspect of marketing has been getting academic attention for many years but only in the last decade has it become a practical focal point for marketing communication practices.
Many traditional branding methodologies rely on values & attributes to define brands, but these tend to be homogeneous in competitive markets. “Innovation” and “simplicity” come to mind as popular values for most technology and service brands, “empowerment” and “enabling” were popular attributes amongst telecom brands during the last decade.
+ Read the rest of this entry
