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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We’ve just launched a new effort called Civil Branding and we are so proud. Civil Branding is all about harnessing the power of mass communication for social influence and brand difference. It’s about putting a socially progressive narrative inside the primary message of the brand. We founded our company around these ideas six years ago and it took us this long to distil the idea into a well formed brand management tool, put a few rounds of research into the field to confirm what we already suspected and generate a swell of interest from the marketing community. Now that it’s launched you can expect to hear a lot more about it. We look forward to hearing from you through our blog and in conversations.

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It’s not every day that you get to redesign a whole new family cards for a bank. The new cards for Budapest Bank communicate the identity we recently designed in a monolithic but fun way.  The logo and key identity elements feature prominently on all the cards no matter whether they are for entry consumers like students or for high net worth clients. We designed a total of 13 cards and all have been launched in the Hungarian market.

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We have been working with the largest company in Palestine, advising on new strategic directions for the brand as they welcome competition into the market. As one might imagine, operating a telecommunications company in Palestine has unique challenges. Telecom masts have been detained at the airport for months while illegal competition from Israel mobile operators perforates the border. The West Bank and Gaza are more or less completely cut off from one another, making travel and moving of goods and services impractical. There are interesting security dimensions that harm and help business. Did we mention there is war on?

The team at Paltel take these incredible challenges in their stride and are focused on growth, community and innovation. The same people who are leading the company are leading social change in the community and for the nation. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some of the leading minds in Palestine, who are vocal in business and the political sphere. We will continue to advise them on their brand as competition enters the market.

After five years in residence at The Tea Building, we have upped camp and moved into Sapling House on Worship Street. While still naked (without signage), it’s a lovely four-storey Georgian building on what used to be referred to as the ‘Old Hog’s Road’. Worship Street is the old dividing line between the civilisation of the old ’square mile’ and the region of uncivilised lands north of the city. We’ll let you guess which side of the road we’ve found our new home on.
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As predicted, we lived through very different times in 2008. Many of us watched stalwart brands make the headlines for bailouts and bankruptcies. Belts were tightened, headcount was shed, fingers were pointed and dramas unfolded. No doubt, we will see this purge continue into early 2009 but likely not much beyond then. 

While there is definitely a down-side to this downturn, the purge will be healthy for the industry. In many ways, we have been living in times of excess and as a friend of mine once observed: “I have seen many more companies die of gluttony than starvation”.  Gluttons are now leaving the table and this can only be seen as a good thing.

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It’s our first annual ‘feel good & waste time’ edition. Just in time for the slack holiday season before we all run off to our endearing but often trying families, immense sedative-like birds and the modern hell that is holiday travel. Sit back, tilt your monitor away from your colleagues, plug in the earphones and enjoy.

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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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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.

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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.

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