Purple Circle and BeWILDerwood win an ‘Oscar’

Hot on the heels of Kate Winslet and Slumdog Millionaire’s success in Hollywood, the Brits have done it again. Purple Circle, the Nottingham-based branding and graphic design studio has just returned from Los Angeles with the themed entertainment world’s equivalent of the Oscars – a THEA.

THEA is an annual award ceremony for the Californian-based Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), celebrating the very best of themed entertainment throughout the world. The award is for Purple Circle’s work with BeWILDerwood – the children’s woodland adventure park in Hoveton, Norfolk. A truly worldwide organisation, all of the big players and many famous names in theme parks and live entertainment are members of TEA - Disney and Universal Studios to name but two.

This year’s award ceremony took place on 7th March at the Disneyland Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Purple Circle’s BeWILDerwood entry was the only British theme park receiving an accolade, and was one of only two European attractions recognised. Other winners for 2009 included the teams behind the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics and The Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood.

John Lyle, Director of Purple Circle, was very excited about the award; “We have known about the award for a few weeks now, but competition is fierce and the winners have to remain a closely guarded secret until the official announcement. To see our little adventure park rubbing shoulders with the likes of Disney is amazing; we believe in the BeWILDerwood brand heart and soul – of course - but it is still incredible that we have achieved such status in such a short time.”

Purple Circle has worked with BeWILDerwood since the park’s inception, creating not only the branding but also the theming and the tone for the entire attraction. The park has been a runaway success since it first opened its gates in May 2007; in 2008 it attracted over 140,000 visitors, a figure more than double the number projected.

Purple Circle operates as an integral part of the BeWILDerwood team, partnering them in all of their creative efforts, including the design of much of the merchandise that is sold through the park and online. This includes the popular children’s books ‘A Boggle at BeWILDerwood’ and ‘BeWILDerbats’ by Tom Bofled, the founder of BeWILDerwood.

John continued “Branding is far more than simply sticking logos on things; rather, it is about an organisation – however big or small – setting a tone for its entire communications and ensuring that the core values of the company pervade every aspect of the business. If you can do this, it doesn’t matter whether you are speaking to your team or to your customers, you can create a brilliant brand - even with a swamp to work with.

This award shows what compelling branding can do when you consider that BeWILDerwood, created on swamp and woodland on the edge of a small Norfolk village, captures the imagination of a worldwide organisation such as TEA, as well as those of British families. Our entry consisted of an eight-minute video letting the kids do the talking - showing them enjoying BeWILDerwood to the max – and we think this is what swung it for us (every pun intended!)”

You can see release on Pressbox by clicking here

Back to the future

Back in 1995, we wrote a proposal for Machine Mart, who we then went on to work with successfully for many years, helping them almost double the size of their business.

A few things remain unchanged in this document from all those years ago.

1. Machine Mart's logo - Which shows that changing a logo is not always the answer to running a business or even making a mark when you take over one.

2. Purple Circle's business values. Even in 1995, they read as follows:

Firstly we only take on projects that play to our strengths - namely those that involve creative thought and project management;

Secondly when we submit a quotation we will stick to it. We will not keep adding extras for 'author's alterations' at the design stage, unless you completely change the brief;

And finally, design comes last. When we are given a brief we stop and think. We don't rush headlong into trying to sell a visual we think you want to buy. We only supply relevant creativity - relevant to your brief. We are not in the business of designing for aesthetic criteria alone and good design is drawn from clarity of thought.

The amazing thing for me is that even after all this time, those are still three of our core values in trading with any client - old or new.

Getting your organisational values right can be brilliant for any business. They give you a clear direction to influence any business decision.

It also said rather proudly that Purple Circle had been established for over four years. That seems like absolutely ages ago now as its just about to be 18 years.

Getting your business values right and then sticking to them for year after year after year ensures that any customer, old or new also knows what they can expect from you or your brand and ensures you know how to recruit potential staff who understand what your business is really all about.

And for your amusement, this is what the three of us looked like back then!

New Business Live Conference

I'm speaking at a conference tomorrow (29th jan) at Nottingham's Trent FM Arena.

It's called New Business Live and is designed to help new businesses, entrepreneurs and other small businesses to be inspired and improve what they do.

http://www.newbusinesslive.net/

I'll be talking about branding (surprisingly!!) and how to build a brilliant brand from scratch - even if you are on a very tight budget.

There's some good speakers overall. Have a look here

Have a look and if its not too late, why not come along and heckle. I seem to have a bit of a graveyard slot and if anyone sits through a talk about legal aspects of setting a franchise up then hopefully my subject area should be a bit more light hearted.

Hope to see you there. I'll be Twittering for much of the day about what the speakers are like, so have a look here if you're interested.

Cheers

John

You don't decide - your customers do

For years, we have been saying that it is not you that decides whether your brand is any good, it's your customers.

That may seem like a bold or even an odd claim, but the growth of feedback websites is proving it.

We are just starting to work with one of the best called Feefo

They are delivering feedback to their clients customers that is transforming their businesses. It has been amazing for BeWILDerwood in that it has helped them learn what they are doing right and wrong and really helped focus some decisions about where to invest in improvements.

For Charles Tywhritt it has been what they have built their entire business model on and 99% of their customers seem to love them - which is an amazing figure for any retailer, let alone an online one.

Gartner inc forecasted some years ago that by 2010 there would be 1 billion camera phones in the market place. Add to that the fact that they are now mostly web enabled and you have a very powerful customer voice indeed.

Richard Branson of Virgin fame, who runs a brand that is properly loved was forced to actually ring a customer who not only wrote him a complaint letter but took pictures of what he was unhappy about and then posted it all over the web. It is one of the funniest letters you will ever see.

Have a look at it here. It's brilliant and well worth reading.

but here are some of the beautiful camera phone pics he took!































Makes you want to tuck straight in, doesn't it Richard, tuck straight in.

What this shows you is that with any brand you have to really listen to your customers

If they decide that your brand is offering them rubbish, they will tell the world. What you need to encourage them to do by tapping into the power of User generated Content and the likes of Feefo, is harness the power of their compliments too.

Bye for now

John

Branding in a recession

Few of us can be in any doubt that times are tough for most sectors of business and all of us will have to adjust our business models to survive and maybe even thrive.

Having started our own business in a recession, we know all about how to trade in these times. There are two key choices:

1. You hide and panic and hope it gets better

2. You stride out confidently knowing it is as bad or worse for your peers and take the opportunity to grab their market share.


Too many businesses drift into receivership by quietly fading away with a whimper, but the best of us use it to adapt and possibly expand and help redefine what we do to make it far easier for our customers to connect with our businesses.

Only if you truly connect with your customers will they continue to trade with you.

There are three ways that we believe we act as customers.

1. Customers want real value.
This does not mean a cheap price, but a sensible price for a good quality product. We would say that it is more likely that people will buy fewer higher quality staples than lots of cheap poor quality products.

So with clothing it would be the likes of Primark who would see a negative effect as they are so dependent on high volumes. Those who concentrate on really looking after their customers and listening and acting on what they want, such as John Lewis and Next will almost certainly do very well in the long run.

They can even offer value ranges for those who wish to trade down without totally compromising on quality.

2. Customers are nervous about commitment.
Again, what this means to us is that the answer is NOT huge great lead times for when you have to pay for things. An ad on TV yesterday was claiming that you paid nothing until 2010 and then took interest free credit. That is just ludicrous and I’m sure it will not be what people want when they are nervous about what their future holds.

Make yourself easy to buy from and offer sensible value and your customers will remain loyal.

3. Customers only trust those they know.
If you have bought from someone before and you know they did a great job or provided a great product, it is more likely you will come back to them as a customer.

Therefore, use PR and advertising to show potential customers other satisfied customers and be loyal to them. Don’t go offering massive incentives to new customers and neglect the ones you have. It is far, far more sensible to build a business based on the ones you have already than always chasing after the next new exciting one on the horizon.

In summary, you have to be clearly differentiated in a way that is not just different for the sake of it but that offers a real and desired point of difference. This point of difference may be as simple as being consistently better in service than others (which is in itself harder to achieve than it sounds) – but whatever it is, you need to tell everyone about it in everything you do.

The days of mass branding are over. We do not want to be the same as everyone else, even if we do buy the same brands.

Branding is not rocket science, it is not just good design, it is a collaboration of clearly thought through common sense delivered through exceptional customer service and a product or service that matches and makes people feel good about their decision.

Treating every single customer as though they are important and valued individuals will ensure your business will not just survive, it will thrive and grow in this recession.

You can see this release on Pressbox by clicking here

Brian Howard Clough, OBE (21 March 1935 – 20 September 2004)

Last week (November 6th) saw the unveiling of the fabulous Brian Clough Statue in the heart of the City in Nottingham. 5,000 people turned out to see it and it was a matter of moments before he was given a Forest scarf to wear through the cold winter night. The £70,000 that it cost was funded through collections from the general public, who wanted to see his passing marked in the city where he really made his name.

One of the ways they raised the funds was through the sale of the banners we originally produced for his memorial service that took place. We loved these when they were first produced in 2004 and they still look great now.

Have a look at their website for some more pictures of the day by clicking here.

We are very proud to have been involved.

We are not in control

Anyone who owns a brand seems to think that they are in control. Not anymore.

Your customers decide. If you run a brand and want to know what people think of it, have a look at this site:

http://uk.brandtags.net/browse.php

Has Wally Lost it?

I'm not just trying to be controversial here, but at the end of last month, I wrote about the new Wally Olins book on branding which I bought to see if we could learn anything new from the man who taught us everything about branding.

This is it here.

Wally Olins: The Brand Handbook

Well, having now read it cover to cover, I have to say I am a little disappointed. Reading the small print, it is billed more as a handbook on 'how to do it' than a book exploring the outer edges of branding theory, but it felt more like a beautifully designed ad for Saffron than anything a decent working practitioner could learn much from.

Maybe we just take it for granted these days, how wide branding projects are and what we get to stick our noses in within any business, but I felt as though this was a bit of a sell out by one of my heroes!

One thing he did say that was really worth reinforcing was the section towards the end about research within a branding context. We have batted on about this for years saying that focus groups are a creativity sink where the bland will always triumph over the brave and not a place to discover great ideas. Thankfully, Wally agrees.

Lessons to be learned in Place Branding

The Daily Mirror had a great front cover article yesterday with david Cameron relaxing on a Cornish beach on his holiday. More interesting to me was the headline on the paper he was reading however.

It was from the Plymouth Herald where they are having a go about an £1/2 million rebrand of the new council logo.

You can read the full article by clicking here

It's not that different to the coverage we got when we did the brand for Nottingham.

Have a look at the case study by clicking here

There are loads of lessons they could have learned in launching this as it seems far too many of this type of branding project is done with too high a profile and with very odd agendas!

We did a review recently with the Nottingham Evening Post and they got a bit more positive after a few years allowing the design to bed itself in!

Again, you can read this by clicking here

Branding needs rebranding

Have a read of this article in the Sunday Times about Saffron looking at rebranding Gordon Brown and New Labour.

Click this link to read it

Ignoring the politics of it, Wally Olins makes a few points that we have been batting on about for for a few years now.

1. The more you advertise a bad product, the faster it will fail.

2. Changing a logo on its own will change nothing - other than the logo.

3. Branding itself needs rebranding - it has a bad name because there are too many people looking to just do (1) and (2) above without any thought to all the other stuff which is, perhaps even more important.

We read Wally's first book years ago and it is brilliant.

Wally Olins On Brand

I guess his second will be just as good too. I've just bought this myself, so will report back soon as to whether he adds anything new to the mix.

Wally Olins: The Brand Handbook

We believe that David Milliband will be the next leader anyway!

One bad brand experience will taint yours forever

We’ve been having problems with T-Mobile and their Blackberry services for months. Every time it sent and email to one of our handsets, it bounced back to tell the sender it hadn’t arrived.

Helpful stuff – particularly as it did arrive and we had people ringing and complaining and all sorts.

We rang T-Mobile on loads of occasions and no-one seemed to want to own the problem and get it sorted.

Finally, I rang to give them one last chance or we were going to shift contractors and then we spoke to Jean.

She took control, involved her techy helper Jason in the problem and was simply brilliant. She promised to call me back five minutes later and then did. She said she thought she had an idea what was causing the issue and would be back to me shortly. Sure enough, she rang back to confirm that it was now mended. It turned out to be something very simple at their end, but no-one else had looked in the right place.

She even said she would call back the next day to ensure the problem had been resolved. Guess what, she did at exactly the time she agreed.

So I thought I would write to their press office telling them they had a star in their team and they should praise her and shout about her from the rooftops.

They sent me back an email almost immediately letting me now they were dealing with it and would be back in touch within 12 hours.
And guess what?

They haven’t been. And its now 42 hours later.

Poor old Jean. She is trying to turn around an underperforming brand single handedly and no-one else seems to be backing her up.

Remember, just ONE bad brand experience will taint your customers view of you – potentially forever.

Will it blend?

We went to see a speaker from Google the other night and he was talking about a US based business that has totally transformed itself by publishing videos on You Tube. And they sell food blenders, not a trendy youth product.
In the first weekend after they put a video on You Tube, they sold more product than they had done in the previous month.

We're all desperately trying to think of a new ways to create such a brilliant cheap solution to driving new customers to what was previously a rather average business.
Have a look by clicking here

This is what it looks like when you blend a load of glow sticks with the lights off:

Oh my word, we've done a podcast!

Well not actually us. But a good friend of ours has and we are being interviewed on it, talking about my view of branding and what you can get right and wrong.

Andy is someone we have worked with for years and is one of our best mates and closest business advisers.

its worth a read of what he says because he is one of those business guru types who is actually practical, rather than all just theoretical rubbish.

He's a good looking fella too. Look:

Have a look at his website for yourself by clicking here:

It's his first of many more to come and he covers the following subjects:

Podcast #1contains: Personal notes ‘work’; Make time for training; The 4P’s RIP; A book worth reading - Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin; An interview with branding ‘guru’, John Lyle; 15 ideas for keeping ‘devoted’ customers.

I rather like being a 'guru'

John

Welcome to our new site

Okay, so its not perfect yet, but its a lot better than the old one. It will be updated over the next few weeks and months and we'll be putting plenty of our thoughts on here, so please bookmark us and come back as much as you'd like.

Thanks, John