Designing Brilliant Brand Gestures
As a creatively minded brand strategy and brand communications design agency ourselves, we at Truly Deeply are always moved by a well crafted brand gesture. And one that tastes as good as it looks and gets real, measurable results for the client – well that’s just too good to ignore.
Kansas City’s Christopher Elbow has a distinctly artistic, artisan approach to chocolate, endearing him to chocoholics nationwide (including Oprah herself thanks very much). To drive traffic to the grand opening of Christopher Elbow’s new store location, an outdoor “installation” of Elbow’s chocolate artistry was created and exhibited in the heart of Kansas City’s arts district timed to coincide with a monthly gallery crawl. Twelve individual chocolate pieces were turned into “framed art” and mounted on walls, with a title card placed adjacent.
The result of this tasty brand gesture? Sales tripled for the period and the store had to stay open two hours later than normal to accommodate the torrent of customers. That’s what we’d call a sweetly successful piece of brand communication.
Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
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Lover of Delicious Chocolate and Brand Gestures
This rich brand gesture was the work of North American food and beverage brand agency Stir. Nice work guys.
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A tasty brand gesture indeed! A great brand communication idea that promotes Christopher Elbow’s creative ‘outside the box’ thinking. Yum, i need some chocolate now.
Stir have well and truly smashed this brand experience out of the ball park! What a delightful creative execution and piece of brand communication not to mention making me feel like some chocolate this early in the morning.
This is an excellent piece of brand communication. It falls out side traditional brand communication and visual language, but is truly a stroke of genius. A great idea like this one, done with a bit of style is what branding is all about.
Tim, I really liked the way they communicated the chocolate brand through a very public art installation to leverage the arts district and gallery crawl. A very smart piece of brand communication design.
Thanks Domma, there’s nothing like a chocolate brand identity design to get the juices flowing.
I couldn’t agree more Ron. Such an intelligent solution that sits in that space between advertising and graphic design. A true piece of brand experience design.
An extremely thoughtful, rich and sophisticated brand gesture example Dave. No wonder they had to stay open late!
I agree Rachel, It’s a great metric for a small business to measure brand communication effectiveness – ‘we had to stay open for two extra hours to handle all the customers’.
Huge props coming from you, Mr. Ansett and Truly Deeply. We’re mighty appreciative of your work and authoritative brand voice. And Australia and Australians for that matter. Thanks to you all for your time and expressions of approval. And cheers from Stir in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
Kudos back Brent. Keep producing great creative ideas to build your clients’ brands, and we’ll keep telling the world about ’em. Look forward to catching up for a meeting of creative minds if we’re ever in Kansas City.
Better believe it. Same goes when we get back to Oz. Way overdue. Cheers for the support.
Love this. A superb idea, I have shown this to Ramsbottom’s little chocolate shop so they can consider doing something out in the community too. Thanks for inspiring even small businesses!
Thanks Anne, glad you liked the post. The thing about creative brand gestures is they can be leveraged by businesses of any and every shape and size. We find small businesses actually have an advantage when it comes to expressing an authentic brand personality through their brand communications over large organizations.
Interesting to see leveraging of the status and value of “art” ,especially in the public sphere, to attach to obviousy very good chocolate.
I agree Judy, we weren’t involved in the project, and maybe Brent can add some insight, but I’d expect the brand definition for Christopher Elbow would have included the term ‘artisan’ – a fitting ‘art link’ for this piece of brand communication.