News & views

Last month Michael Wolff, co-founder of one of the world's most iconic design companies - Wolff Olins – addressed the city of Liverpool in a lecture called ‘Branding the City’. Wolff’s decision to focus on the brand identity of a city is another addition to the list of high profile bids to capture the brand of a city, in order to attract tourists and businesses. The City of Melbourne’s newly unveiled brand has caught people’s attention worldwide, as did The Greater London Authority’s recent (disastrous) invitation to tender for the design of a ‘Brand for London’. With all of this recent attention on destination branding, we thought it was a good time to consider the identity of our city and soon realised that Brighton needs a brand.

view full story about Why Brighton needs a brand

Posted Tuesday 15th of December 2009

Each year colleges and universities up and down the country run intensive campaigns in an attempt to attract and engage new students. Marketing and branding budgets are spent on elaborate prospectuses, events, press ads and outdoor advertising. Many further and higher education institutes run strong campaigns with local schools in order to feed students on to courses, but despite all of these efforts it’s becoming increasingly harder to attract new students.

These challenging times, may be due to increasing numbers of distance learning options or the number of new academies opening. However it is more likely that it is due to the changing nature of the demographic. The upcoming generation of learners have been labelled many things, including “Generation Y”,  “Millennials” and “The Mobile Generation”, but one thing is for sure; they are part of a worldwide cultural phenomenon that is going change the rules branding and the way education is delivered.

view full story about Are you ready for Mobile Generation learners?

Posted Tuesday 6th of October 2009

Your brand, your promise
When you create and deliver a brand you construct an image, an image that customers will use to evaluate your business. That image has a number of different tasks, depending on your business objectives, but it’s fair to say that all brands should give a true representation of a business’s values. Your brand makes a promise to deliver on its image.

However, if your brand image hides a different story, it’s very possible consumers who have bought in to your product or service will feel cheated. We all know that a cheated consumer is not to be messed with, as the web provides limitless outlets for customers with negative feelings.

view full story about What can marketers learn from the Innocent backlash?

Posted Friday 11th of September 2009

It is a common myth that if you register a company name at Companies House or a domain name with a registrar then you have an exclusive right to use that name. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

In today’s market-place, your intellectual property is your biggest asset. Businesses spend time, money and effort promoting brand awareness to ensure customer recognition, therefore, it is wise to legally protect your business identity from potential infringers who could reap the benefits of your hard work.

view full story about Trade Mark Advisory partnership

Posted Tuesday 17th of February 2009

It is often cited that logic informs decisions, but emotions drive actions therefore in order to drive your customers to pick up the phone to you or pick up your product; they need to be engaged emotionally. If you think for a moment about the brands that you like, the products you buy, the shops you go back to. How many of those things make you act because they provide lots of facts about them? I’m sure if we tried we would be hard pushed to list the benefits of our cars over a similar model, but I know we could all talk about how we feel about our cars.

view full story about Is the left ever right?

Posted Monday 3rd of November 2008

Anyone who works in or around the law sector will know there is a huge shake-up coming. Since the dawn of time, the law practitioners have operated in a distinctly brand-free arena, where the major share of organisations are high street solicitors. But at end of this year a new player will enter the market. The Legal Services Bill kicks in at the start of 2009 and it will allow anyone to own law firms. It will no longer be a requirement for a person to be qualified in law to run a law firm. This means brand savvy businesses that understand the leverage and value in design investment are going to be appearing in the market very soon. It also means that all conquering 'super brands' like Tesco and Virgin will have the ability to swoop in and take work away from small to medium size firms.

view full story about Branding the Law

Posted Monday 8th of September 2008

Accessibility is a term that gets pushed around a lot by designers and digital agencies, but what does this have to do with your website or marketing plan? Well the first thing to say about accessibility standards is that is not just a ‘nice to have’ feature for your site, it’s a legal requirement. If the way your site is built stops people from accessing information or making any form of transaction online, then you could very quickly find yourself in a long and very messy legal battle.

view full story about Accessibility - Why should I care?

Posted Saturday 16th of August 2008

Unless you've been living underwater for the past six months, you will have heard the grey people in grey suits talking about an 'economic downturn' and a 'looming recession'. We all know that any form of financial recession makes people in marketing brush up their CV's and prepare for imminent cutbacks. Many of the old school business advisors will tell you that when belts need to tighten, it’s marketing that will often be scaled back first.

One of the most common mistakes in business is to market when you’re lean on work. If you wait until your workforce is twiddling their thumbs before you decide to market yourself, you will find that your constantly dealing with severe peaks and troughs in income, which ultimately stunts your growth potential. Even the most well conceived marketing tactic can take weeks to execute and converting leads to orders may well run into months or even years, depending on your business.

view full story about Smarter Design Investment

Posted Tuesday 15th of July 2008