In a world where just about every company seems desperate to be global, it is refreshing to still find great local brands that are proud of who they are and where they come from.
An avid reader of our blog from down south, has put me on to Betta Milk, a Tasmanian brand that has stirred up Tassie pride to fight off competition and entertain The Apple Isle.
Internal Email:
Hello Everyone,
I am shocked that someone in the studio would steal my Greater Western Sydney Giants Coffee Mug, which I bought from the official Greater Western Sydney official merchandising website.
I was hoping to be the first one to use it (was saving that moment for their first win), but the dream is over.
Lachlan.
Today I discovered some great brand thinkers who happen to be bike mechanics. 178 Cyclery in Brooklyn have inverted the process of buying a bike. Rather then selling you something from the stock they have in store or what they can order from their supplier, they accompany and guide you on a process of discovery and learning tailoring a custom bike that is as unique as you are. Read the rest of this entry »
Creating Memorable Brand Design
As creative director of our brand agency I’m always being asked by our clients how to create the most effective brand identity or corporate image. The answer always includes the invaluable elements of owning ‘Unique Visual Properties’. Unique visual properties are visual elements of your brand identity that position your brand and its strategy in the hearts and minds of your target market, but just as importantly, achieve that goal with fresh and unique visual language. By consistently presenting your unique visual properties to the market, over time you will own them and their brand associations, providing you with defensible, bankable brand equity. Too many visual identities utilize the same small handful of type styles, leaving the door wide open for brands to select remarkable and distinctive typefaces to reflect their unique brand proposition and personality.
By a long shot the most popular blog we’ve ever written was a collection of cracking custom typefaces we published a couple of years back. Literally tens of thousands of people have enjoyed the blog and it continues to be popular. So when you’re on a good thing…
Just snapped a pic of this poster taped to a pole outside Dead Mans — our local coffee spot.
Love it.
Nike is no stranger to controversy surrounding the brand but this time, it is self-inflicted due to a lack of research.
Launched to celebrate St Patricks Day, Nike’s ‘Black and Tan’ sneaker has been labelled insensitive and offensive. What should have been a clever brand gesture has turned into a crisis management campaign for the shoe giant.
Communicating the Vision
As a brand strategy and identity design agency who has worked for a number of years in the property development space, we understand the challenge of creating a sense of the promise and vision of a place that will one day be a vibrant community, but is most likely currently a barren field. The same challenge is faced by developers and development marketers whether they are creating a one hundred apartment building, of a ten thousand home community — how do a create a powerful sense of our vision so that a customer is drawn inexplicably to our project and not to one of our competitors?
The Kiwi Sceptics is part tourism campaign, part airline campaign and part dig at stubborn Aussies. The premise is to take Australians with unfavorable opinions of New Zealand and trick them into traveling across the ditch to change their minds. It is a lovely case of well executed brand story telling, twisting cliches and misconceptions, all told through the eyes of characters that are easily related to and reflecting stereotypes that are at times scarily honest (for an Aussie). The campaign is by Air New Zealand, but you would be forgiven for mistaking it for a New Zealand tourism piece, which is an interesting platform, leveraging creative brand positioning, Air New Zealand is promoting and supporting their own national identity, their own people and their own culture, which is a lot more than some national carriers some can boast.
Dominos New Eat-In Concept Store
Domios Pizza are set to introduce an all new menu featuring organic ingredients and fresh salads. The new menu has been designed to suit a shift to eat-in restaurants with open kitchens so you can see everything being made. Each store is being carbon audited — so a design approach that included recycled materials was part of the brief. With the Dominos share price continuing to climb, it seems that the worse the economy gets, the more fast food people eat — Dominos is trying to make fast food healthier.
Last month we began writing a regular column on branding for The Melbourne Review. This first of our articles begins an exploration of the state of ‘brand Australia’.
Yes, we escaped the financial meltdown of 2008 relatively unscathed – but to a large degree, this was gifted to us by the strength of the current resources boom. However, the resulting two-speed economy is, by default, shaping significant industry re-structuring.
The booming resources-fueled Australian dollar is also beginning to shape our future. Exporters and import competing businesses are finding it more and more difficult to compete, simply because whatever previously defined their competitive edge has been significantly discounted. In terms of foreign trade, the two star performers, education and tourism, are being seriously squeezed.
