Had a great pow-wow today with other media partners, who up to now have worked independently on Humberside Police Marketing Campaigns. We’ve all decided to collaborate on a huge campaign and today LB presented our campaign concept Mindmap to the others involved – Bluestorm and ImageData. We’re looking forward to working with them, sharing ideas and ultimately delivering some tasty campaigns in 2010.
The charity project we bagged last week has taken a leap forward.
Based on the charity’s light but significant activity so far, and global locations of the charity’s work to date, the name is The Orange Dove Foundation. We’ll have a lot more to say about it as the launch strategy plays out. We are working on the identity now, both Mat and me have ideas so it’ll no doubt be a fusion of the best stuff from both of us. Or a fight over who’s idea is best…maybe!
What is it you do differently?
Making or selling widgets is special isn’t it?… I mean not everyone can do it, so that must make widget makers and widget sellers specialists… nope.
What makes a business a specialist is a service or product that elevates the business offer beyond competition. With the right brand you could start to compete on ‘knowledge and brand’ rather than ‘price’. Are you sitting on a specialism that has not been clearly defined, branded and taken to market?
Becoming a specialist can only increase market share as the competition at specialist level is less and the returns are higher. Give us a call if you think you have something special that needs a special brand.
We’ve just submitted an expression of interest to develop a series of typographic sculptures as part of this year’s landmark ‘Larkin 25′ programme to commemorate the 25th anniversary year of Philip Larkin’s death.
This is the poem that will form the inspiration for the work… fingers crossed.
Toads – Philip Larkin
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually _starves_.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
Image Courtesy of Arnold Lobel
We’ve been doing more than our fair share of work in schools recently. One thing that struck me about school is in some ways the most obvious – people go there everyday to learn.
So few people approach work as a place you can go to learn, everyday we’re working with a learning mindset, we’re getting better at what we do, and not stagnating, we’re making connections with new collaborators and new developments in technology.
It’s made us more inquisitive, we’re researching more, we’re reading more and our clients are seeing benefits in the depth and range of the services we can offer.
We had a cup of tea with a prospective new client last week and it must have been a nice cuppa – as we bagged the job.
Ok, we had to do a bit more than make a nice cuppa…
Gary met him when buying some skiing boots and it snowballed (parden the pun) from there. Good old networking in its purest form – meet someone, chat, get on, work together. Simple.
The project is to create a spanking new brand for a charity – we’re a bit excited – we don’t know what it’s called yet as we haven’t decided, but we’ll be looking at every aspect to ensure it punches its weight – and we’ve started to get thoughts together already.
More on this one to follow.
Gary just got back from skiing the Three Valleys in France today. This shot was taken by Simon Dixon on iPhone while on a hairy adventure off piste which took in some challenging black run skiing. Gary is at the back, being cautious, for once.
The current economic climate demands that our brands and businesses operate from a position of strength or market share will be eroded by competition. We’ve just launched LB+ which was born from our collective knowledge of branding and love of creative thinking and, we feel, it’s the antidote to negative market conditions – the adrenalin shot your business needs to secure a safe passage through turbulent times and emerge stronger for it.
The world can often appear as a crowded space for brands to compete in, we have well established brands with years of heritage such as Ford, Marks and Spencer and British Airways tightly packed alongside brands that are not founded on their past but more of a promise of the future as they continue to dictate the rules of new market places and set the pace of change such as Apple, Google and Amazon.
If you consider these mega brands as marbles in a jar you will quickly observe the more marbles you have, the more gaps you have between them. The more spaces for new markets to develop and new brands to establish themselves.