Last Friday night the winners for the 2010 Melbourne Advertising and Design Club (MADC) Awards were announced. The annual MADC Awards celebrate excellence across a range of advertising and design categories, encompassing print, radio, television and ambient media.

We were excited to see that Gelati Sky took out the Silver for The MADC Award for Best Packaging Design (Label Only) and was a finalist for The MADC Award for Best Corporate Identity Design. While our own brand Truly Deeply took out a bronze for The MADC Award for Best Self Promotion Design.

The MADC Award for Best Packaging Design (Label Only)
The story of Gelati Sky (premium gelati range) has a strong personality driven by Gelati Sky founder Paul Scalisi’s memories of growing up in Rome, eating gelati – ‘a world where every moment seemed frozen in an amazing sensory assault and every cloud in the sky made you feel it was about to rain gelato’. We were looking for something that was strikingly unique, represented his story and would create conversation. The communication platform of ‘it’s what dreams taste like’ was derived out of the brand strategy definition for Gelati Sky.

The MADC Award for Best Self Promotion Design
We had a name that embodied the balance of our creative and strategic talents, while resonating with the true emotional power of strong branding. We became Truly Deeply. An organisation obsessive about creating brands that evoke powerful emotional connections with customers. Now we had our name and a great brand descriptor ‘Re-imagining Brands’ we needed to focus on the visual language that would bring our brand to life.

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their life eating, sleeping, thinking about brands
give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

In brand, your customers view of the world and how your offer adds value to them is all important. Sometimes if you’re fortunate enough, your customers will actually even communicate their impressions of your brand, what it’s doing well and where it’s falling short for them. Social media provides brands with a sound-track of customer conversation which is a ready source of rich insight. But customer conversations are only valuable to a business when they have the mind-set to listen, interpret and act.

In what can only be described as an online experience, Chris Milk, Arcade Fire and Google have created an experimental interactive music video. The Wilderness Downtown, as it’s called, is a marvel well worth watching all the way through. You’ll need Google Chrome (or maybe Safari 5) for it to work, as it’s all created in HTML5. It’s a wonderful way to get people to download Google’s new browser, demonstrate the abilities of it, promote the band, their song and show the possibilities of an emerging web standard. All in all a stand out multi brand experience.

Check it out here. Read all about it here.
I discovered it via TPUTH, another daily haunt of mine.

To talk to us about dramatically different brand experiences drop us a line

Derek Carroll
Director of Design

In Brand communication, as in life you get one chance to make a first impression. Reminder to businesses of all sizes – best price does not necessarily = best offer (At least it’s spelled correctly).

Celebrating 20 years of AGIdeas
I always say you can judge the quality of a design book by how heavy it is (oh, and whether it features us and our work too). ‘Design is Difference’ is a retrospective of the 20 year history of agIdeas, it showcases more than 2,000 works of over 400 design and creative leaders who have presented at agIdeas International Design Week throughout its 20 year history. Including creative luminaries such as Stefan Sagmiester, Paula Scher, Massimo Vignelli, Alan Fletcher, Shigeo Fukuda and representatives from global design studios like Pixar, Dreamworks, Frog Design, Pentagram and of course little old us – Truly Deeply the brand strategy and communications design agency. This book is the epitome of ‘design is difference’, the differences within design and that design can make – sounds pretty serious – looks seriously impressive.

Called “Share Happy,” the machine senses when people are near-by, and uses facial recognition technology to determine the age, gender, and emotional state of the person. The machine’s ‘smile-o-meter’ rates the quality of the smiles; rewarding those with huge, high-beam grins smile with free ice cream – talk about expressing a brand personality. Interestingly, those who engage can share pictures on Facebook via built-in 3G. In this age of social networking, brands that are providing new experiences get far greater leverage if they also facilitate brand storytelling.

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
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Designer of Tasty Brand Experiences

The success of the Greens in last weeks Federal election in Australia is a great reminder that markets are not homogenous, that there are different segments with different needs. The Greens have ended up with a National Senate Vote of almost 13% and surprise, surprise, a controlling influence on matters that come before that House of Parliament. Throw in the independents who have also convincingly won seats and you get further insight into the diverse market needs of an electorate. But segmentation is not the purpose of this blog, rather the degree to which the Greens have been ever present in Australia in recent weeks is a great reminder of nature and the Greens quest for ecological sustainability – more specifically the lessons on offer for business, from nature.

To this end I would like to share a Fast Company magazine’s take on the thinking developed by Adam Werback in his book Strategy for Sustainability (Harvard Business Press 2009) – along with a few interpretative thoughts (love the license some brackets provide!)

1. Diversify across generations (hang-out with younger generations, they always see the world differently)

2. Adapt to the changing environment and specialise (think challenger brands!)

3. Celebrate transparency. Every species knows which species will eat it and which will not (think real triple bottom line reporting)

4. Plan and execute systematically, not compartmentally. Every part of a plant contributes to its growth (the death of the silos!)

5. Form groups and protect the young. Most animals travel in flocks, gaggles, and prides (think potent graduate programs and meaningful mentoring programs)

6. Integrate metrics. Nature brings the right information to the right place at the right time. When a tree needs water the leaves curl; when there is rain, the curled leaves move more water to the root system (at the very least take on the thinking offered in Good to Great and know what drives your economic engine if you won’t step up to triple bottom metrics)

7. Improve with each cycle. Evolution is a strategy for long term survival (rapid pilot programming is a useful mindset)

8. Right-size regularly, rather than downsize occasionally. If an organism grows too big to support itself, it collapses, it withers, it is eaten (consciously decide what resources are core and what can be outsourced or contracted for specific projects)

9. Build an enduring foundation. Nature uses resources only to the level that they can be renewed (think beyond risk profiling and equity to debt ratios – factor in the renewal of your people)

At very least the above is a reminder of the power of an effective analogy in creative thinking. If that does not make sense to you, think again!

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

A great reminder that often when it comes to brand communication – the simple ideas are often the best. In a wonderful brand gesture, the owners of this bike shop north of Berlin attached around 120 bicycles to the facade of their store to draw attention to their business. Simple.

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

When I was a kid my mother used to buy the cheapest private label cornflakes she could find and serve them up as the real ‘Kellogg’ thing by putting them in nondescript plastic cereal containers. Even as a kid I knew I was being served an inferior product – and if I had any doubt, breaking a tooth on the gritty, overcooked grain confirmed the switch. I swore when I grew up that I would never betray my favourite brands for a few cents, my family would never eat inferior brands.

It’s a promise I kept for many years. Then the GFC hit and I fell under the spell of the private label. Guess what, no gritty bits. In fact acceptable quality and lower cost – the perfect partners. Very quickly saving money became a weekly goal and its achievement delivered  huge satisfaction in its own right.

It seems I was not alone.

My thanks go to the folks at Australian Food News article and a recent report from Datamonitor research that shows my savings addiction is in fact an epidemic. In the research at least 1/3 of Australians reported buying private label products to save money either ‘most of the time’ or all of the time over the past year, peaking at 44% in May 2010. Added to that the survey found that many Australian consumers believe private label brands are comparable to well known brands in terms of quality (50% for cleaning products for example).

As well as striking a chord with me as a consumer this trend also resonates in my professional life. If the consumer (god that’s me) is being bewitched by price and satisfied by the quality they receive from private label,  brands need to act now to reverse the trend. Competing on price may be a short term fix but in the long term is unlikely to be sustainable. As an addict I can tell them they’ll need to have do some work to win me back.

A starting point is to go back to basics and revisit the brand from the roots up. Have a go at redefining the brand for the new world economic conditions, is the brand storytelling still attracting the consumer, is the brand voice still contemporary and attractive, is the brand design doing everything it can, does the value proposition still have appeal.

Truly Deeply is a Brand Agency that works with numerous brands, to deliver brand strategy and brand design, with the objective of differentiating those brands from competitors, both private label and branded competitors. If you’re feeling like you need to take a good look at your brand to better protect it against private label why not give us a call.

Malcolm Harvey
Brand Saviour and savings addict.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video’s shot by the guys at Droga5. Not sure this rings with the rock authenticity the brand demands, but kind of a cool thing to do all the same.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brands that Rock It Real.