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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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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We were appointed by Daniel Swarovski Corporation to create a name for a new range of crystal animal figurines. The project has been successfully kept under wraps by the team at Swarovski until it’s launch in May.

‘There’s been much naming work over the past year which indicates increasing investment in new brands by global companies. Our experience includes FMCGs, credit cards, financial and professional services & fashion, so we were pleased to add Swarovski to our portfolio. The Swarovski team had a very clear vision for the new range which helped make our collaboration a great success,’ said Daniel Gomez at Brandinstinct‘

The Lovlots project was really a lot of fun for us. It’s rare to become involved in a product range that is so irreverent and cheeky. It’s definitely targeted more at the Avril Lavignes than Bridget Jones of this world. I do think the range will help Swarovski target a new customer profile and facilitate further growth in the Asia Pacific region.’