Branding for Local Government
We’ve been recently working with a regional Victorian Council, over the years we’ve worked with Local governments all over Victoria, from the City of Melbourne to the Moira Shire Council. We’re working developing their brand, evolving the brand mark, creating a visual language. and creating a brand system, they can use to easily communicate on brand. It reminded me of the key steps we’ve taken over the years, with our Local Government clients, that have delivered a successful branding project. I thought it’d be good to share them.

Working with Local Government has it’s challenges, but so does working with any organisation. They have no market, no competitors, you can’t pick another council to empty your bins or maintain your park. But they have a vital need to successfully communicate their brand to all their constituents. They need to clearly communicate where every dollar of rates has been spent. These are my 5 keys for successfully branding a Local Government, but they could apply to any organisation.

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We all love a unique brand expression and I can’t help but acknowledge one of the most remarkable brand expressions I’ve seen in recent times (albeit dating back to the late 1970s) from one of the most iconic and well know fashion brands in the world – Gucci.

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Creating Experiences

Over the holidays I indulged in a little self expression. The Town Hall Gallery in Hawthorn accepted my proposal to stage my first solo exhibition. I wanted to explore convention and human interaction within an art space. The installation was to cover the gallery floor with canvas and then use pigment to write words and draw pictures directly onto the canvas. As people came into the space they would spread the pigment across the floor.

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What a shocker of a time Toyota has been having! Over 8 million vehicle recalls world wide, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it gets a lot lot worse. Toyota has now moved from an acceleration problem to a braking problem. The number of new recalls may be a lot less, but we are now dealing with the model that they have been backing their future on, the hybrid Prius. Add the Lexus HS 250h to the recall list and we are also playing at the prestigious end of their brand portfolio. The big question is will it put the brakes on the brand?

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Like bumping into an old friend
Currently I’m in the market for a new TV, so last week whilst I was shopping at Victoria Gardens, I popped into Dick Smith to see what they had on offer. On the way in I was greeted by a familiar face, Dick himself. See they’ve yet to rebrand this store with the new identity. As you may know, last year Dick Smith rebranded (some stores anyway). Now much has been said about the design of the new brandmark and I don’t mean to get into the issues it may have or lecture the designers who created it – what I do want to talk about is the brand personality and what I see as a missed opportunity. Seeing the old identity in all its glory reminded me of what has been lost.

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All Brands Have Meaning
Whether carefully and strategically considered or by default, all brands hold associated meanings in the market place. Well considered brands establish a competitive brand proposition (their brand strategy) with layers of meaning to both differentiate themselves from their competitors and to connect with their audience. These brand reinforce their meaning through all of their actions or brand touch points. As a brand agency we help brands to define their meaning and create the brand design for all their communications in order to create a consistent association with these layers of meaning in the minds of their customers.

Apple Vs Microsoft
Today we compare the brand associations of consumer technology icons Apple & Microsoft.

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Working for a creative brand agency I’ve always valued remarkable advertising and marketing. One particular stand-out for me was Veet’s “Goodbye Bush” ad that ran as a quarter page in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Melbourne’s Herald Sun in January 2009. The ad was forwarded in a viral frenzy to family, friends (myself being one of them) and colleagues around the globe, by 3pm the same day had made it’s way back in the in-boxes of staff where the campaign had started – Euro RSCG’s Sydney office.

So what was it that made this ad so remarkable it created a life of its own?

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The Code of Great Annual Reporting
For 20 years we have been developing corporate brands and communications. Our work has seen
us decode much of the brand and corporate communication landscape, working for businesses across all sectors operating in national and international markets.

AR:ReView is the culmination of us turning our decoding methodology towards defining the a market oriented criteria for creating annual reporting content to global best practice standards.

As we lead the thinking for our clients on their brand definition and communication, we see AR:ReView as a natural extension of how their brands connect with their shareholders and stakeholders, answering the questions:
• How can shareholder reporting be more informative
and accessible?
• How can we best provide the information investors and the market value, in a format that is more engaging, more functional, and easier to understand? Read the rest of this entry »

When advertising and the Customer Break-Up
When it comes to brands, the old adage of the customer is always right is pretty much spot-on. Maybe it’d be more accurate to say the Customer is never wrong. With traditional ad campaigns no longer connecting with their audience at the same emotional level, it’s time for clients and agencies to say “it’s not you, it’s me” and really mean it.

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Branding a place or a region is no different to product or service branding – you have to own something that is distinctive and compelling to your target market. However, when it comes to regional branding there is an added complication. You have to balance the competing needs of a diverse set of stakeholders because the people and businesses that make up the region simply do not always see the world through the same lens. Different mental models, different types and sizes of businesses, different levels of self interest and all that before one even layers in the different egos at play.  A lot of stakeholders and lot of emotion makes for interesting branding.

With such a diverse range of stakeholders, the developers of regional brands need to adopt a strategic and pragmatic approach. For a start there needs to be recognition that not all stakeholders will be of equal value in building a world famous regional brand, that the 80:20 rule is well and truly alive. Certainly the team we worked with on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia understood this point. Led by the regional Development Board, the regional branding process started with identifying those businesses that were considered mission critical to being on-board. Clearly your preference is to have everyone on board, but it can also be a very liberating feeling if instead you identify the 20% of stakeholders who will give you 80% of the bang, you can then immediately narrow your focus. And of course the law of attraction always works, enlist the shakers and movers and others will want to jump on board anyway. Once you have the right people involved there is a need to explore what makes up the region, what makes it a special place. Is it nature’s gifts, is it food producers, is it the unique experiences on offer, is it wine, is it a combination.

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