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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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.

1. Methodology or why the next big thing isn’t

For a long time, the industry has tended to jump from one marketing fad to the other. There is a whole side-industry to the marketing discipline which repurposes kernels of academic discoveries or just plain common sense insights, rebrands them as buzz-words and turns them into ‘marketing fundamentalism’.

The typical structure is ‘It’s all about X’, with X being the flavour of the month: values, experience, ‘love marks’, one word equity, buzz, relationship, customer equity, customer centricity…

Many of those ideas are important, some are empty, but the point is that it’s one thing when a single idea is used to create a focus for a book, and another when it becomes a dogma that takes over an agency or an organisation – that’s dangerous.

It’s ok for your agency to have a methodology; even more so, it should have methodologies, but beware an agency with The Methodology™. In a world where almost no axioms are left, and where best practices should be reused carefully due to the increased complexity of business, communication and audience dynamics, dogmatic approaches lead to failure.

Our reality is messy, complex, sophisticated and unique. Trying to squeeze reality into a template or a black-box is pointless.

We appreciate the fact that in the most familiar project or situation, there will always be something new.

When we approach strategic problems we try to approach them with certain looseness. We let the situation direct any tools or models used. We have a robust collection of methodologies that we can utilise and adjust to fit a unique problem. This ‘emerging theory’ approach is better equipped to deal with the paradoxical nature of marketing situations, and with real life – in all its messy, strange, mysterious glory.

In this approach, you figure out the tools, even shape them, as you delve into the problem, embracing its messiness. Then, gradually, you see meaning emerging and possible solutions take shape.

The Cracker project is a case in point: This could easily be approached as ‘yet another packaging project’. But it wasn’t.

It was full of contradictions and quirks: there was no clear free slot for it in the market, no audience or retailer was clearly waiting for it and the USP seemed to go against the fundamental nature of the category.

By getting back to basics and mapping the different stories juices tell, we were able to create a unique concept and get the product picked up by major retail players. (read more about this project)

2. Relationships or Branding that plays together, stays together

Maybe because branding is positioned as a premium professional service, it tends to collect unnecessary etiquette protocols. The marketing manager leads the programme and won’t let others near it. In traditional agencies he is in contact with a relationship manager who connects him to a consultant who cannot speak to the client directly unless he is unveiled in a presentation. The consultant cannot speak to designers, because he is ‘a suit’, so he speaks to a creative director who’s versed in the way of the suit and can translate it to the gentle geniuses of the creative practices.

This absurd tradition creates a broken telephone effect and needless frustration. Those multiple translations and limitations on communication and perspective are a sure way for meaning to distort or just get lost, as well as a lot of needless political pain.

Instead, we like to see what happens when everybody interacts, knowledge shared openly and conflicting agendas used to spark creative solutions.

The Pasta Pagani product catalogue is a case in point. It was born thanks to close interaction between consultants, designers and a variety of roles on the client’s side. This catalogue is a deliverable born out of marrying an aesthetic design led approach with practical business sensibility. The result doesn’t just look good and is different from anything else in its category, it also bridges the work of sales people with the work of the people working in the factory’s food lab. (Read more about this project).

3. Culture or There’s no insight like local insight

As an international agency, there are two traditional dogmas we try to keep away from. The first is that of the ‘benevolent imperialist’, with consultants marching into a new culture like masters of the universe whose international-marketing-guru knowledge cannot fail – all-knowing conquistadors. At the other extreme, you have over-PC-anthropologists trying to go native and ending up looking like an enthusiastic dad in a school disco.

There is a delicate ecology created when local and global cultures interact. That’s why we try to combine our international experience with local insight.

While creating the retail design for MCS/Say in Romania, we started the project by walking around different stores with the client. Our entire team visited their sites, competitors’ stores and popular Romanian retail players in other categories. We discovered that most telecom players were just imposing on the market a bad recreation of some western retail trends. We studied what makes the Romanian audience tick and then adapted our best practices to work in harmony with this local sensibility. (Read more about this project)

4. Identity or Beauty at work

Let’s admit it: Branding has become the ‘prima donna’ of marketing.

Naturally, companies and their brands tend to adopt bigger aspirations as time goes by, and branding, developed in the later stages of marketing’s evolution and becoming more dominant as a company evolves, has a tendency to deal with ‘higher needs’.

‘The dirty work’ is left for sales, or advertising. With many organisations going as far as assigning separate managers to MarComs and advertising, out of an ambition to recognise the importance of those ‘higher brand needs’ and separate them from ‘commercial’ advertising.

As a result, many organisations find that the huge investment in branding and marketing communications is ‘not working hard enough’. Living with the results of a branding programme becomes a little like moving-in with someone very attractive just to discover they are lousy kissers, have bad hygiene and don’t help with the rent.

Instead, we like to create brand identities that work as a system and are not afraid of getting their hands dirty. Our work on No1 and Sohar are good examples. While the identity has an aesthetic sensibility that communicates a differentiated message emerging from the strategy, it doesn’t stop there. The identity system is created with the sales applications and everyday promotion in mind. That way the identity doesn’t just communicate the high aspirations, it connects those aspirations with everyday business.

5. Engagement or organic branding

Too often, a robust branding programme spends most of its life inside the marketing department. Then, ‘when it’s ready’, it is launched with fanfare on the unsuspecting, or worse, the highly suspicious, organisation. From our experience, most branding failures happen on implementation because the organisation won’t get behind a programme people don’t believe in.

Instead, we recommend engaging the entire organisation from day one of the programme and increasing this engagement after launch.

With Budapest Bank, strategy emerged from a series of workshop with a mixture of middle and senior management and key employees. Then, once it got accepted, and while identity was being developed, the organisation was engaged from the top – with workshops bringing senior managements on board; and from the bottom – with workshops creating brand champions.

Brand strategy was launched without fanfare, as a practical tool, bringing together existing programmes and different levels of the organisation, months before the identity was launched. When the actual identity was launched the entire organisation was already busy with both management and grassroots initiatives that bring the strategy to life, and the new ideas have been trickling in those internal activities as well as external marcoms, so changing the identity felt like a reasonable step forward, rather than a skin-deep marketing activity. (Read more about this project)

In summary – it’s all connected

We believe you should embrace the messiness to find meaning, instead of trying to fight it. Life is messy. Marketing is getting messier and messier.

We see disappearing barriers between organisation disciplines and agency disciplines; between brand and audience; between media channels; between product and brand.

We see more and more strategic challenges which are multidimensional and paradoxical. We see old marketing practices that stop working, sometimes unexpectedly, almost inexplicably.
Too many marketing people out there are shutting their eyes, trying to pretend nothing has changed.

We believe by recognising the messiness, you don’t give up meaning, but actually improve your chances of finding unique, authentic solutions.

We prefer to be systemic, not systematic – to be strategic about strategy. So instead of a purely analytical, modernist, approach that claims to paint a full, rational, map of your situation and then attacks a single aspect, we try to see the whole hidden in the parts, and create a state of flow that is in harmony with the basic interconnectedness of all things.

We believe that when you appreciate it’s all connected, you can create sustainable brands.

Sustainable brands, like any sustainable concept, give more than they take – to you and to your audiences.

Because sustainable brands promote sustainable relationships, and we all know that sustainable relationships create sustainable business.

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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.

Benefits of connecting your brand and your employees

1. Retention and loyalty.

The brand creates a reason for working beyond collecting a pay cheque, and increases employee preference for the company (so that it is the employer of choice). When speaking to directors of HR in UK retail banking, they find employees, particularly customer-facing employees, will move between banks based on a small pay rise, creating intense competition for a limited talent resource. In fact, employees that share the values of the company and have a meaningful connection with the direction of management, will stay longer and move less often. This point is especially true for top performing employees who naturally need to feel more connected to the direction of the company as they climb the ranks.

2. Attracting new talent and the right talent.

New recruits often prefer to work for well known brands consistent with their own values and image of themselves. So using the brand within your recruitment strategy, recruitment campaigns and interview processes, can not only be useful in bringing in the talent, but can also bring in talent that is already aligned to your direction.

3. Less conflict.

Employees that clearly understand the expected behaviours and norms work together effectively to achieve the desired work environment. Corporate development becomes a matter of inherent momentum of the group towards the vision, rather than just the policing of rules and regulations.

Brand engagement can enable employees to reinforce the same messages as the advertising campaign communicates, thereby strengthening not contradicting or fragmenting the customer experience. A brand strategy derived from management vision gives employees a sense of norms, stability and direction. The purpose of the company becomes clear and decisions are made with greater consistency and effectiveness toward achieving the company goals.

When a brand is disconnected from its employees the result can be internal confusion, cynicism towards management and internal communications, apathy or ignoring the brand messages. In such cases, employees will not lend strength to your brand in their interactions with customers and each other.

What is brand engagement?

Brand engagement plans address corporate cultural realities and operational priorities resulting in defined milestones and initiatives to implement.

1. Implementation and cascading of the plans and initiatives across the company.
2. Brand leadership building to ensure consistent messages from the top.
3. Internal communications campaigns and ongoing messaging consistent with the brand strategy.
4. Ongoing measurement and tracking of employee brand awareness and engagement.

How do we do it?

Our approach: Plans versus cultural patterns

It is not enough to produce an operational plan that tells you how to integrate the brand into the business if the current culture will resist the changes in direction. If you are addressing any form of brand development, you are talking about change. This is an exercise that goes beyond the marketing team. You will want to create forums for open dialogue, an interactive and contributory process that is undertaken in a way that secures people’s honest views. Using principles from organisational theory, such as appreciative inquiry and other systemic practices, you can unearth the potential cultural patterns and other factors that are either consistent or in conflict with the brand direction. You can address or utilise patterns in order to create successful change.

Cultural patterns are not created by one person alone. They are ways of working together that have developed over time, often with good historical reasons. For example, a company that goes through a period of uncertainty may adopt strict controls around risk. However, many ways of working outrun their usefulness or appropriateness to the change you are trying to create. Years later, the same company may have recovered from uncertainty and now needs to take more risks in order to achieve expansion or innovate in a changing market. Some patterns will help us in developing our brand and some will hinder its coherent implementation. These issues and patterns of behaviour need to become part of the discussion with the appropriate levels of management.

Operational plans need to be developed in conjunction with the people responsible for the work. Often when people are handed their plans or priorities without their involvement, they feel little responsibility for the result and important insights from them may not be considered. Several obstacles to their performance can be created before you have begun. The right people need to be involved at the right time to set the actions that need to happen and bring the others along with you.

Large events, small group events, and coaching for managers combine elements of training with culture development and action planning. These activities are not just about learning, they are about enriching the detail and meaning of the brand vision and connecting people to this vision. Using internal stories that describe ‘on brand’ experiences and successes can be gathered and shared in forums and then incorporated into internal communications. These stories will help others build a picture of where you are going and what is expected. Within these forums, key stages from the appreciative inquiry model can be used to develop employees thinking on important issues and bring them to the point of innovation and action planning. These key stages are:

Discover what works best, deconstruct and learn from successes.

Envisage the future with the brand vision and define what the company and employees would be doing, what the company would look like, and who would be involved.

Create the action plan with the vision in mind, ultimately asking what needs to be done differently.

Implement the plan and create mechanisms for follow up and support to sustain efforts.

Typical steps to brand engagement

1. Brand check

Uncover insights into what is working well and what is not working with your brand strategy. Is this a neglected brand that needs renewed leadership and participation? Is this an existing brand that is not having its full potential realised by customer facing employees? How do people respond to the brand vision? How has it been used so far? How is it being communicated and through what channels? Ultimately you need to ensure your strategy is relevant, credible, and differentiating.

2. Plan objectives

What do you want employee engagement to achieve? What do you want to see done differently? Set objectives that, when reached, will show how things have changed.

3. Infrastructure mapping

Map out the organisation. Find the areas where the brand is being used well and where it is not. Are there gaps in the use of the brand in any of your major functions? Develop the communication and feedback links needed to progress the project. Identify the best people and where and when they need to be involved.

Map out the inter-dependent activities that are running concurrently in your organisation. How does the brand relate to these operational and strategic directions? How does it relate to other communications and business strategies? Determine how the brand should influence and be used within these other work streams.

4. Developing insights into cultural patterns

Uncover the usual ways of working in your organisation, the cultural patterns that will help and hinder progress with brand development. What it is like to work there? What works well? What needs to be different to achieve your objectives and your brand vision? Bring these patterns into discussion with the people who need to hear it. Discuss within management teams how to address these patterns, and whether they are indeed priorities for change.

5. Engagement plan

Set the priority areas to target for building brand engagement with employees and within operations. Develop the initiatives and actions that will begin the process of culture development that will ultimately synchronise the brand and culture. Set priorities for the operational areas to work on both within their usual process of working and through special initiatives. Write a plan that outlines the results of the above exercises and the important cultural and operational insights made. Get feedback and sign off on the next steps from the appropriate channels.

6. Implement and cascade

Begin implementation. Set up and deliver the culture development workshops as per your plan. Begin training with the brand where needed. Engage employees in their roles and responsibilities towards helping the organisation achieve the brand strategy. Communicate as widely as possible internally, developing campaigns and integrating the messages into your usual internal communications channels..

7. Follow-up

Any new plans should be integrated into current work practices and progress tracked. Much of what can be done is the same work undertaken in a different way, so it is not always about creating new work to do.

When obstacles arise, help each other address and work through them. Focus on the learning and successes that are happening along the way. You need the right communication links between people to ensure consistent follow up and support.

8. Measurement

Running throughout brand engagement activity is measurement. You do not want to measure for the sake of it, nor to tick a box and look like you have done something complex. Keep measurement as simple as possible. You want it to be realistic for your resources to implement, so that you can capture the change and test repeatedly over time. You can capture this change by incorporating the right questions into current employee surveys, customer surveys and by relating the work to current KPI’s which you would expect to be affected by the brand.

Another perspective

The benefit of using an external consultancy is the outside perspective that facilitates and ensures progress when confronted with difficult situations. An outsider can more readily identify patterns that may be difficult to face from the inside and provide the skills needed to facilitate employee groups around issues of brand and leadership development. These issues are often best dealt with by someone other than a colleague or manager. The contribution of a consultant is to facilitate new approaches to working, develop the forums that promote reflection on how best to reach your objectives and why, and then generate the momentum to act on the common vision. Using principles from both marketing and organisational development combines the best knowledge and practices necessary for complex brand related change.

Case Study

Budapest Bank

As a GE Money bank, the company wanted to create a differentiated brand in what is an overly generic market. Looking to the market produced no answers. We needed to look inside the company to find the answer and set the direction. Once the positioning was created, the company began its journey. This is when brand engagement helped them find the path to develop who they wanted to be and how they were going to make it happen. We looked across employee touch points, customer touch points, key service offerings and to the senior management team to not only create the means for expressing their story, but to create leadership in developing the company toward one vision. We did this in a way which fostered unified leadership from within and created a momentum for growth that carried on beyond our involvement.

Our brand engagement processes not only provided plans for cascading brand messages and adapting current systems to suit the brand, we also found cultural patterns within the organization that helped and hindered progress. We brought these patterns out for discussion to either challenge them, or use them. Subsequently, we created forums and experiences within which employees could innovate, be creative and find meaning in the new direction for their work. This process took the company beyond their traditional methods of planning and problem solving towards a process of change and innovation.

We did this by using the principles of appreciative inquiry (AI) to create forums and develop thinking amongst employees to find out how they would take responsibility for the new vision. Important insights developed that helped to create realistic and achievable plans that acted on the vision in each priority division.

The key principles used from AI were:

1. Discover what works best, deconstruct and learn from successes.

2. Envisage the future with the brand vision and define what the company and employees would be doing, what the company would look like, and who would be involved.

3. Implement the action plan with the vision in mind.

4. Develop mechanisms for follow up and tracking.

We created the space and time for people to be creative, to work from their own experiences and to learn from successes as much as focusing on what needed to be different.

The program was well received by employees, who found the process energizing and productive. They committed to new actions to achieve the company vision and requested more time together to further innovate and plan with the new vision. They all agreed to embed the vision across the company and they were eager to develop similar skills to ours with which to do so. The success for us was not only defined by the positive employee feedback, but by the actions which arose subsequent to our involvement.

Budapest Bank Testimonial

‘Brandinstinct’s approach to brand building not only delivered a great and relevant new brand concept to GE Money Bank, but their facilitation was also fundamental to the internal approval and engagement process. With their help we have a new communication strategy that delivered positive business impact and improved brand strength significantly, most importantly our organisation is aligned to delivering what we promise to our customers.’

-Andrea Szabo, Chief Marketing Officer
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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.

We discovered that while major banks in Hungary were making many attempts at emotional positioning, they were missing the mark. The findings were very consistent: no bank clearly owned any truly differentiating position in the market. Hungarian customers were cynical about banking and didn’t see a lot of difference between players – this was a sign of a market ready for a bold new positioning.

Uri Baruchin, the consultant leading the project tells: “All the competition were using similar global consumer banking trends, promoting them using an over-emotional communication style that was popular with western banking brands around the turn of the millennium. The Hungarian audience, who are understandably sensitive to propaganda, largely rejected these attempts. Even in cases where relevant and credible claims were being made, all banks in the market failed to differentiate.”

While assessing the strategic situation, we discovered people’s perception of their banking experiences to be generally poor, and their expectations very low – customers simply didn’t think banks stand for anything, only switched a bank on extreme negatives and focused on their fears or anger, depending on their power as customers. The only way this rift could be mended was with a leader that empathised with the pain and attacked the challenges of modern banking from a different angle.

“The market had slipped into a market plot we call ‘the generic loop trap’” says Uri, “A category is largely generic, and on discovering that, brands turn to customers for answers. However, in these situations, customers only speak about their generic experiences, so any vision or ‘new’ concept based on this input, mistakenly labelled as ‘customer insight’, manifests as a generic result. Back to square one.”

We realised only Budapest Bank itself could define how things can be different. The new brand strategy we defined for Budapest Bank created a new connection between their heritage of product innovation and what it actually stood for. This newfound ideology created a new common ground between the brand and the worldview of their customers. The result was a call to change – no-nonsense banking, with a brand that gets straight to the point. The new ‘no-nonsense’ vision galvanised senior management and they began to use the brand as a major tool for change in key initiatives and in guiding the cultural norms for the company.

Even before the new brand identity was launched, a campaign based on the new brand narrative quickly became one of the most loved and successful ads in recent market history. When the brand identity was finally launched, it served as a signal of Budapest Bank embarking on a new journey.

The change goes much deeper than communications: a brand engagement programme, facilitated by our consultants, rallied employees behind the new cause. This approach continuously instigates both cross-organisational and grassroots change initiatives, all focused on the new commitment, and the process creates substance behind the bold exclamations of the new positioning.

“While the positioning addresses a need in the market, it also relates to competencies held within the bank around product innovation.” Says Gill Garner, who led the brand engagement programme “However, we discovered that change within the culture and operations of the bank needs to happen before such a consumer-centric position can be attained. The bank placed product development at the core of operations. While Budapest Bank must rely on this strength, customer needs must be brought from the periphery into the centre in order to inform which products are selected for the pipeline, the way in which they are delivered in the market through service initiatives and the way in which they are communicated.”

Andrea Szabó, CMO for Budapest Bank-GE Money Bank, says: “Brandinstinct’s approach to brand building not only delivered a great and relevant new brand concept to Budapest Bank-GE Money Bank, but their facilitation was also fundamental to the internal approval and alignment process. With their help, 12 months after kicking off the work we have a new communication strategy that delivered positive business impact and improved brand strength significantly, our customer touch points are harmonized to our new brand promise and most importantly our organisation is aligned to delivering what we promise to our customers.”

These are very exciting times for Budapest Bank and we enjoy our continuing work with them very much. We’re currently working on their extensive credit card portfolio.

And by the way, we’re really pleased with how the ‘no nonsense’ brand strategy comes through in the launch advert, poking fun of the importance of the new identity. You can watch it below.

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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.

Emanuela Prina, Marketing Manager for Pagani tells: “As a large part from our Customers are international and as we aim at focusing more and more on the foreign markets, we wanted to co-operate with an Agency that was not so much involved with the typical Italian pasta clichés. Someone who brought a new approach. Brandinstinct came back to us with fresh ideas resulting in an innovative and effective project.”

As we started getting to know the client’s world, walking with them through their plant, and chatting over some great Italian pasta, we were blown away by the pride of the employees and their unbelievable perfectionism and attention to detail. Words like premium, high-end and quality, usually bog standard industrial clichés, suddenly received a whole new meaning when faced with a group of people who are obsessed with performance.

Our two main insights for this project were related. Firstly commoditised products can be inspirational, secondly B2B doesn’t have to be functional. Uri Baruchin, the consultant leading the project says: “B2B projects are often looked upon as boring and uninspiring. Maybe because they tend to push communications in a functional rather than emotional direction, unlike B2C projects where it is already standard to rely heavily on audience insights and emotional benefits.. As a matter of fact, while B2B marketing projects often result in generic communications, we believe it is only because you have to dig deeper and find the emotional beneath the functional. The allegedly performance-led, functional values are, after all driven by emotional values such as passion, commitment and a unique worldview. One only needs to look at famous Italian brands like Pirelli and Lavazza to see how commodities can carve out an emotive niche in the B2B sphere.

Pagani’s new brand, with a strategy focusing on B2B account holders and major buyers as a target audience, is highly differentiated from the rest of the pasta category. It emphasises the shared values of high performance that connect Pagani with its business target audience. Furthermore, this strategy still holds significant consumer appeal as discerning consumers will find the idea of using the same ingredients as world class restaurants and hotels appealing.

The new brand identity is simple yet bold, following a tradition of Italian design excellence. It brings to the front the commitment and uncompromising performance of the Pagani people. It smells of achievement. It combines the timeless design of the logo with custom created photography and illustration by top international talent from our creative network.

“My aim on Pagani was to create a brand, which is naturally contemporary and speaks confidently across all media.” Says Christoph Stolberg, lead designer on the project. “The goal was to create a simple modern identity, complimented by a distinctive illustration and photography style which emphasises quality of product and process. Longevity was provided by designing the identity system to be flexible and modular. Working with such a passionate client made the design process a pleasure, which I believe facilitated a successful result.”

In just under four months, Pagani launched their new brand in the recent Ciba food exhibition in Parma, Italy. Exposing a new business suite, brochure, catalogue, web-site and booth design, all designed by Brandinstinct.

The catalogue is an interesting case in point. It is inspired by the famous Pantone colour palette fan-style catalogues. Instead of colours, it show types of pasta with photos and scientific illustrations (recreated for the project in painstaking detail and adjusted to scale). The detail of the illustrations emphasise the level of knowledge, accuracy, obsession with detail and Pagani’s phenomenal product consistency. But this is much more than a marketing communication piece – full page versions are now used in Pagani’s food laboratory as a quality assurance tool.

Peter Assembergs, CEO of Pagani says: “Brandinstinct succeeded 100%. We feel very satisfied: we have been collecting enthusiastic comments both inside the company and outside, from our customers, suppliers and even from some kind competitors. The toolkit we were given by Brandinstinct is something very flexible and easy to use: we feel we can work by ourselves even on some new applications related to the ones we have received from them. What makes Brandinstinct different is that they are very good at listening, understanding and translating their customer’s needs. Working on a new identity is not a picnic. Thanks to Brandinstinct we didn’t live the stressful and demanding side of the project (I’m sure there was one…) we were involved on a regular base, effortlessly, and enjoyed many nice and challenging parts of the project. It was a lot of fun and satisfying every time we received news from them.  “

When our clients at Pagani sent us pictures of themselves smiling and holding the new deliverables, fresh from the print house, we knew we’d done something right.

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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.

The design of the book captures the new Russian fashion trend in maximalism. Christophe Stolberg, who led the design of the book adds: ‘The challenge was to balance the luxurious and moody elements of the brand with some level of restraint in order to convey the volume of maximalism without wandering into noisy territory.’

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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.

Sheikh Suleiman is a self-made man, beginning his career as a street moneychanger and eventually building the largest Islamic bank in the world. He is renowned for his continual efforts to improve the lives of average Saudi citizens. Sheikh Suleiman saw this new property development effort as a chance to improve the very fabric of communities in the kingdom. Up until now, property development in Saudi Arabia has been a cottage industry: buildings are erected with little concern for their surroundings, urban planning concepts like mixed use development ideas are not mainstream yet and much more concern is placed on the bottom line than on the community.

We worked with the management team to identify a vision that corrects this balance and provides more social outcomes for the developments built under the Al Rajhi name. The brand identity we created is a nod to modernist values that promote the idea of harmony, strength and progress.

While the business was well funded, like any start-up, human resources were in short supply. So, our focus was to provide plug-and-play deliverables that could be deployed quickly. The parent brand would operate with many other indivudual property brands, so the parent Al Rajhi brand needs to flexible enough to work with the sub-brands and still remain powerful enough to lend credibility and quality to each property in the portfolio.

During the course of the project, we developed a bespoke Arabic typeface, which, won an international design award at the Type Director’s Club in New York. Andrew Morris and Habib Khoury were the designers who developed this typeface. The client has agreed to make this font available for other people and companies to use. This unusual act demonstrates the progressive vision of the Al Rajhi group.

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