Rebranding presents a great opportunity to boost a company’s fortunes. Digit checked out the best way to do up a brand.
The challenge of re-aligning the consumer’s attitude towards a brand is fraught with danger. Messing with a brand’s image can be disastrous, but it can breathe new life into a struggling company.
Unsuccessful rebrands are a cynical attempt to gain attention for a failing product that’s no longer in tune with its customers,” says Paul Mallett, managing director for Swamp. “A successful rebrand maintains brand heritage and endorses the arrival of new products and services. The rebrand only adds weight to this.”
It’s the successful rebrand we’re concerned with here, though it’s possible to learn from some spectacular failures. Coca-Cola’s rebranding as New Coke is the example most people think of, while Consignia was rapidly changed back to Royal Mail after public and internal outcry.
“There were enormous structural changes that went on within that company that needed to be reflected within the identity,” says Michael Berthon, creative director of English & Pockett. “That wasn’t one of ours, but it always gets a huge kicking. The public didn’t buy into it and felt it was a change of name for the sake of it. The public’s first question is always ‘how much did that cost?’ What they don’t tend to realize is that they are just seeing the surface manifestation of a much deeper change within the company.”
A true rebrand then is more than just an evolution of the design. It’s the result of underlying change within a company, whether it’s a desire to change an image, motivate staff, or move into a new product area. “The scale of the change of the identity should equal the scale of the change within the organization,” says Keith Wells, director at Dragon Brands.
“Nobody should know the brand as well as the marketing people and so much depends on the clients’ attitude,” says Berthon. “They should be able to judge your work from a position of knowledge and give you an impartial opinion on whether something works or not. They shouldn’t be getting involved in why something is not working. When clients are emailing you logos that they’ve sketched on the back of a cigarette packet, you know the project is compromised.”
That’s not to say that you should keep the client at arm’s length. “The more clients get involved the better the work conclusions are,” says Gavin Anderson, director of Geometry.
Tackling client expectations is a bugbear for design companies. It’s important to establish objectives from the outset and make them measurable. “You need to continually cross-check against the objectives and, on completion, compare once again with the original objectives,” says Wells.
Other golden rules include seeking input from stakeholders from the start, and then going through a scientific process of research, planning and execution to reach your goals. You also need to do your homework. “Don’t come up with the greatest logo ever only to discover that you have subconsciously nicked it from someone else,” advises Mallett. “Give your client plenty of options. Don’t try and force your view on them, unless you are absolutely 100 per cent convinced that you have come up with the best idea ever – and you can prove it.”
Rebranding: National Express
Agency: Dragon
National Express, the successful passenger transport company, had a problem. One of the best-established brands in the UK, it had become familiar and was taken for granted. Very few people knew the reality behind the brand – the scale of its operations, the changes it had made over 30 years, the range of products and services it had developed and acquired, and the dedication of its people. In short, it had become tired and fallen off the public radar.
Numerous acquisitions meant it had become fragmented – the acquired businesses had kept their names and identities, with no sign of belonging together. This problem was repeated on a cultural level – divisions worked separately, with a “production” mentality ruling over any thought of customer service.
On a branding level, it was complete chaos, with a different name and different identity for everything and everyone involved.
When a new management team joined National Express, its aim was to reinvigorate the business and rejuvenate the brand. Dragon was appointed to help following a three-way pitch in mid-2002.
“At the beginning of the project, National Express wanted to review and reposition its brand and knew that a new commitment to customer service had to be at the heart of the business,” says Keith Wells, director at Dragon.
Dragon began with a review of all background materials and activity, followed by internal management interviews, workshops, and customer research. Dragon uses its own Ellipse Analysis methodology to define brand positioning. This was used to define the “brand story” for National Express.
“The story was based on giving people ‘better connections’ and needed to be truly integrated into the everyday activities of the business,” explains Wells. “Everything was being brought together as one company. ‘Making things easy’ was defined as the new way of doing things in the new National Express brand.”
Next, Dragon reviewed the initial concepts, involving a wide range of National Express staff. A final route was chosen from a shortlist of three concepts. Thereafter, only a core team of individuals across the business were involved. From this process, a new brand identity and architecture were created.
All services were rebranded, and the “making things easy” ethic was extended to customer information. “This involved new signposting for where each service went, and more engaged station staff and drivers,” says Wells. “The Web site was to be called nationalexpress.com rather than the anonymous GoByCoach.com, and the internal presentation of the new brand positioning and identity was designed to use icons based on motorway signs.”
There were internal and external briefings on what the new brand was to stand for, how it was to drive new behaviours through the organization, and what the differences should mean to individuals connected to the business.
The new identity launched in March 2003, and immediately received positive feedback both internally and externally, with immediate reactions through a press launch. “After three months, direct sales increased by 11 per cent and Web site hits increased by 40 per cent,” reveals Wells.
“National Express made savings of over £1 million in marketing synergies. It was made easy for employees to engage with the brand by creating a presentation style that used icons based on motorway signs, which have now become part of the internal language. As a result, staff morale was high with 99 per cent saying ‘we’re really going places’. The customer experience was made easy with clear literature and signposting, helpful staff, a new Web site, and easy to access information.”
Dragon, www.dragonbrands.com
Rebranding: Televiziunea Romana (TVR)
Agency: English & Pockett
In 2004 English & Pockett took on the daunting task of a rebrand of Televiziunea Romana (TVR), Romania’s largest public service broadcaster. Though a huge project – it was the biggest development on the Romanian TV market since the 1990 political revolution – it’s not such an unusual one for the design company.
“The majority of our work is rebrands rather than start-up, just because we tend to work with broadcasters who have been around a while,” says Michael Berthon, one of E&P’s two creative directors on the project.
TVR is a big company with 3,000 staff and a sizeable mixture of main and local channels. “It’s a big corporation but it didn’t have the image of that,” says Berthon. “It had been going 10 years and was really out of date. It was a real root branch rebrand with a lot of underlying changes.”
TVR dropped the average age of its staff, and invested in some new equipment and better production facilities, but the internal staff were very unmotivated.
“They felt that they were loyal to their channel, but their loyalty was to their department, not to the overall corporation,” says Berthon. “So a huge part of this rebranding was to do with making the people that worked there proud to feel part of the organization rather than just their little corner of it.”
The network didn’t have a brand architecture in the visual sense. “It was just a set of disparate logos conveying a schizophrenic array of messages,” recalls Berthon.
The first step was the conceptual agreement of project structure. “Specifically, that we would develop an overarching logo property to unite the brand combined with individual brand concepts to express the spirit of each channel,” explains Berthon.
The new identity unites, for the first time, the network’s four nationwide channels, its regional stations, news output, and corporate identity. The logo architecture is based around a distinctive “R” symbol. “This balances the network’s Romanian origins and international outlook while expressing the genuine passion for broadcasting at the heart of the TVR Corporation,” says Berthon.
“The on-screen identity for the network’s flagship, TVR 1, establishes a concept of forward looking, point-of-view images, shot on location around Romania.”
To convey this, E&P locked a grid of perspective lines to the camera whenever there was filming involved. “We could match up these lines with roads, railways, kids in the park – you name it,” says Berthon. “TVR started to film seasonal ones, and take the identity on for themselves. We provided them with a kit so that they can keep it alive and give it the best possible longevity.”
Feedback for the rebranding was mostly positive. “We found that, although press comment was initially good, there was some criticism,” says Berthon. “We think that the test of it is going to be in 18 months to two years time. If the stuff is still working and the channels are taking it on themselves, developing new screen idents, it will be a success. The final judgement can’t be done one week after its release. There is always the shock of the new.”
An encouraging development is that almost all the other local commercial broadcast competition has since been going through rebranding exercises.
“There is the sense that TVR raised the standard and all the others are having to follow suit,” says Berthon. “In the broadcast industry it was very well received. They said it was the first time in Romania that a public service company was seen to be behaving like any other ambitious private company, and that was quite a new thing.”
English & Pockett, www.english-pockett.com
Rebranding: Globe Corporate Travel
Agency: Large
When a company needs a complete rebrand including a name change, it’s obviously a massive project. Globe Corporate Travel had a series of approximately 25 travel brands that were destination-lead: JustDubai.com, ThailandDirect.com, JustTheMaldives.com, and so on, all with very varied designs. Although combined the brands were generating almost £20 million in annual sales, Globe obviously struggled to build any kind of brand recognition or repeat sales unless people were going to the same country again.
“The client didn’t have a brand strategy before we came into the project,” says René Christoffer, design director at Large. “They wanted to sell more to their large database of happy customers.
The old Globe umbrella was a group of 16 names, some originals, others built on existing designs. Nothing other than the word ‘just’ was common for the 16 names – and this was only in some of the words.”
Large started with a strategic audit where positioning, target user profiling and brand values were established. “To build a new brand is a two-sided affair,” explains Christoffer. “We really need to understand the company and what it offers. In return, it needs to define itself – usually the main reason for a rebrand.
“As a branding agency not only can we create and roll out the brand, we also operate as brand advisers in the beginning when the definition takes place. To get to understand the new brand we did a series of brand exercises internally as well as externally.”
There were several requirements for the new name for all of Globe’s companies. It had to be available as a URL address, because the company primarily operates online. The new brand name needed to sound classy, and be short, snappy and easy to remember. “We invented a clever name generator that output 5,000 new words based on a given number of syllables,” recalls Christoffer. “Our copywriter then picked the better ones and modified them to express the Globe values and offers.”
At the same time, Large started on the visual part of the branding work. “First we flipped through hundreds of typefaces, which had a distinctive professional ‘specialist’ look about them,” explains Christoffer. “The inspiration was high luxury brands and products in fashion, perfume, and cars. The next step was to either modify the type used to write the word or to create graphic devices to go along the type.”
Meanwhile, Large’s name generator had come up with the sophisticated word Voyana. “Not only was this a completely new word, but it also sounded good, with elements of voyage and a foreign sounding ‘-na’ ending, as well as possessing visual impact,” says Christoffer.
Rolling out the brand fell into two phases. The first involved the design team testing the quality of the logo on various random dummy applications, such as post cards and ticket folders. “Besides kicking off the guidelines it also made us make decisions on images, colours, and secondary typefaces,” says Christoffer.
The second part saw a travel brochure and business cards produced, by this time with an established look-&-feel for the images used with the brand.
“As with the logo, they needed to show passion, specialty and professionalism,” says Christoffer. “We did this by literally getting close, zooming the subject, and bleaching the images a little. This made it look miles apart from all other travel competitors who use exactly the same bland palette of blue sky and white beaches.”
Large provided slim, free-styled, and friendly design guidelines, involving only a few rules on clear space and minimum size. In all, Globe spent about £30,000 on naming and brand design.
“As the strategic part of the branding work was done together with the client, we pretty much did everything right from the beginning,” says Christoffer. “Unfortunately we had to do a few more routes than we would have liked to due to the fact that someone else had taken a bespoke name. As the naming was a part of our deliveries, no extra costs were given to the client. We just had to work faster for a few days.”
The client and Voyana’s staff were extremely happy, because the result was a brand that they felt a lot of ownership over and they could see the potential in having one name with the destinations below. “Their confidence grew as a company because they now looked like a major player,” says Christoffer.
Large, www.largedesign.com
Relaunch: Heinz soup range
Agency: Swamp
A new range of Heinz Soups had been developed ready for launch in winter 2004 – part of a relaunch of the whole Heinz soup range including packaging redesign and recipe enhancements.
Swamp’s job began with Heinz asking how to communicate this fresh initiative to its customers, with an online message. The company has been retained as the online marketing agency for Heinz UK, with the opportunity to put forward online marketing ideas for all campaigns within Heinz.
“The soup market is becoming increasingly competitive with new flavours emerging all the time, combined with customers’ preferences for buying fresh rather than tinned soup,” says Paul Mallett, managing director of Swamp. “Heinz needed to refresh its range with more modern recipes and re-affirm to consumers that their soups are healthy, free of additives, flavourings, and colourings, and are indeed as good as ‘fresh’ soups.
“Most modern food brands have Web sites,” continues Mallett. “Heinz soup wanted to align themselves with brands more like ‘Innocent Drinks’ than with older preconceptions of their brand. Online rich-media advertising provided a great route to back up TV advertising in delivering the main campaign messages about natural, homegrown ingredients.”
Step one involved planning rich-media advertising and online advertorial, followed by ideas for the Web site and online promotions including competitions.
The initial visual stage was next, with three ideas presented as mood boards and rough designs. Once this was finalized, the initial sketches of the main Web site pages followed. No style guide was in place – all the design for the online campaign was developed from packaging and the overall Heinz brand.
“We went through several ideas at the rough stage,” recalls Mallett. “We always budget for at least three different creative concepts at this stage. Once we had settled on a final design concept we were pretty much straight into production, with still graphics being worked up and signed off by the client prior to producing finished animated Flash graphics.
The Heinz Soup brand team approved all work. “Our client was very pleased
with the Web site,” confirms Mallett. “Traffic levels have been great with good response to competitions and promotions. The development and promotion of the site will continue throughout 2005.”
Swamp, www.swampme.com
Written by Michael Burns, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006
The challenge of re-aligning the consumer’s attitude towards a brand is fraught with danger. Messing with a brand’s image can be disastrous, but it can breathe new life into a struggling company.
Unsuccessful rebrands are a cynical attempt to gain attention for a failing product that’s no longer in tune with its customers,” says Paul Mallett, managing director for Swamp. “A successful rebrand maintains brand heritage and endorses the arrival of new products and services. The rebrand only adds weight to this.”
It’s the successful rebrand we’re concerned with here, though it’s possible to learn from some spectacular failures. Coca-Cola’s rebranding as New Coke is the example most people think of, while Consignia was rapidly changed back to Royal Mail after public and internal outcry.
“There were enormous structural changes that went on within that company that needed to be reflected within the identity,” says Michael Berthon, creative director of English & Pockett. “That wasn’t one of ours, but it always gets a huge kicking. The public didn’t buy into it and felt it was a change of name for the sake of it. The public’s first question is always ‘how much did that cost?’ What they don’t tend to realize is that they are just seeing the surface manifestation of a much deeper change within the company.”
A true rebrand then is more than just an evolution of the design. It’s the result of underlying change within a company, whether it’s a desire to change an image, motivate staff, or move into a new product area. “The scale of the change of the identity should equal the scale of the change within the organization,” says Keith Wells, director at Dragon Brands.
“Nobody should know the brand as well as the marketing people and so much depends on the clients’ attitude,” says Berthon. “They should be able to judge your work from a position of knowledge and give you an impartial opinion on whether something works or not. They shouldn’t be getting involved in why something is not working. When clients are emailing you logos that they’ve sketched on the back of a cigarette packet, you know the project is compromised.”
That’s not to say that you should keep the client at arm’s length. “The more clients get involved the better the work conclusions are,” says Gavin Anderson, director of Geometry.
Tackling client expectations is a bugbear for design companies. It’s important to establish objectives from the outset and make them measurable. “You need to continually cross-check against the objectives and, on completion, compare once again with the original objectives,” says Wells.
Other golden rules include seeking input from stakeholders from the start, and then going through a scientific process of research, planning and execution to reach your goals. You also need to do your homework. “Don’t come up with the greatest logo ever only to discover that you have subconsciously nicked it from someone else,” advises Mallett. “Give your client plenty of options. Don’t try and force your view on them, unless you are absolutely 100 per cent convinced that you have come up with the best idea ever – and you can prove it.”
Rebranding: National Express
Agency: Dragon
National Express, the successful passenger transport company, had a problem. One of the best-established brands in the UK, it had become familiar and was taken for granted. Very few people knew the reality behind the brand – the scale of its operations, the changes it had made over 30 years, the range of products and services it had developed and acquired, and the dedication of its people. In short, it had become tired and fallen off the public radar.Numerous acquisitions meant it had become fragmented – the acquired businesses had kept their names and identities, with no sign of belonging together. This problem was repeated on a cultural level – divisions worked separately, with a “production” mentality ruling over any thought of customer service.
On a branding level, it was complete chaos, with a different name and different identity for everything and everyone involved.
When a new management team joined National Express, its aim was to reinvigorate the business and rejuvenate the brand. Dragon was appointed to help following a three-way pitch in mid-2002.
“At the beginning of the project, National Express wanted to review and reposition its brand and knew that a new commitment to customer service had to be at the heart of the business,” says Keith Wells, director at Dragon.
Dragon began with a review of all background materials and activity, followed by internal management interviews, workshops, and customer research. Dragon uses its own Ellipse Analysis methodology to define brand positioning. This was used to define the “brand story” for National Express.
“The story was based on giving people ‘better connections’ and needed to be truly integrated into the everyday activities of the business,” explains Wells. “Everything was being brought together as one company. ‘Making things easy’ was defined as the new way of doing things in the new National Express brand.”
Next, Dragon reviewed the initial concepts, involving a wide range of National Express staff. A final route was chosen from a shortlist of three concepts. Thereafter, only a core team of individuals across the business were involved. From this process, a new brand identity and architecture were created.
All services were rebranded, and the “making things easy” ethic was extended to customer information. “This involved new signposting for where each service went, and more engaged station staff and drivers,” says Wells. “The Web site was to be called nationalexpress.com rather than the anonymous GoByCoach.com, and the internal presentation of the new brand positioning and identity was designed to use icons based on motorway signs.”
There were internal and external briefings on what the new brand was to stand for, how it was to drive new behaviours through the organization, and what the differences should mean to individuals connected to the business.
The new identity launched in March 2003, and immediately received positive feedback both internally and externally, with immediate reactions through a press launch. “After three months, direct sales increased by 11 per cent and Web site hits increased by 40 per cent,” reveals Wells.
“National Express made savings of over £1 million in marketing synergies. It was made easy for employees to engage with the brand by creating a presentation style that used icons based on motorway signs, which have now become part of the internal language. As a result, staff morale was high with 99 per cent saying ‘we’re really going places’. The customer experience was made easy with clear literature and signposting, helpful staff, a new Web site, and easy to access information.”
Dragon, www.dragonbrands.com
Rebranding: Televiziunea Romana (TVR)
Agency: English & Pockett
In 2004 English & Pockett took on the daunting task of a rebrand of Televiziunea Romana (TVR), Romania’s largest public service broadcaster. Though a huge project – it was the biggest development on the Romanian TV market since the 1990 political revolution – it’s not such an unusual one for the design company.“The majority of our work is rebrands rather than start-up, just because we tend to work with broadcasters who have been around a while,” says Michael Berthon, one of E&P’s two creative directors on the project.
TVR is a big company with 3,000 staff and a sizeable mixture of main and local channels. “It’s a big corporation but it didn’t have the image of that,” says Berthon. “It had been going 10 years and was really out of date. It was a real root branch rebrand with a lot of underlying changes.”
TVR dropped the average age of its staff, and invested in some new equipment and better production facilities, but the internal staff were very unmotivated.
“They felt that they were loyal to their channel, but their loyalty was to their department, not to the overall corporation,” says Berthon. “So a huge part of this rebranding was to do with making the people that worked there proud to feel part of the organization rather than just their little corner of it.”The network didn’t have a brand architecture in the visual sense. “It was just a set of disparate logos conveying a schizophrenic array of messages,” recalls Berthon.
The first step was the conceptual agreement of project structure. “Specifically, that we would develop an overarching logo property to unite the brand combined with individual brand concepts to express the spirit of each channel,” explains Berthon.
The new identity unites, for the first time, the network’s four nationwide channels, its regional stations, news output, and corporate identity. The logo architecture is based around a distinctive “R” symbol. “This balances the network’s Romanian origins and international outlook while expressing the genuine passion for broadcasting at the heart of the TVR Corporation,” says Berthon.“The on-screen identity for the network’s flagship, TVR 1, establishes a concept of forward looking, point-of-view images, shot on location around Romania.”
To convey this, E&P locked a grid of perspective lines to the camera whenever there was filming involved. “We could match up these lines with roads, railways, kids in the park – you name it,” says Berthon. “TVR started to film seasonal ones, and take the identity on for themselves. We provided them with a kit so that they can keep it alive and give it the best possible longevity.”
Feedback for the rebranding was mostly positive. “We found that, although press comment was initially good, there was some criticism,” says Berthon. “We think that the test of it is going to be in 18 months to two years time. If the stuff is still working and the channels are taking it on themselves, developing new screen idents, it will be a success. The final judgement can’t be done one week after its release. There is always the shock of the new.” An encouraging development is that almost all the other local commercial broadcast competition has since been going through rebranding exercises.
“There is the sense that TVR raised the standard and all the others are having to follow suit,” says Berthon. “In the broadcast industry it was very well received. They said it was the first time in Romania that a public service company was seen to be behaving like any other ambitious private company, and that was quite a new thing.”
English & Pockett, www.english-pockett.com
Rebranding: Globe Corporate Travel
Agency: Large
When a company needs a complete rebrand including a name change, it’s obviously a massive project. Globe Corporate Travel had a series of approximately 25 travel brands that were destination-lead: JustDubai.com, ThailandDirect.com, JustTheMaldives.com, and so on, all with very varied designs. Although combined the brands were generating almost £20 million in annual sales, Globe obviously struggled to build any kind of brand recognition or repeat sales unless people were going to the same country again.“The client didn’t have a brand strategy before we came into the project,” says René Christoffer, design director at Large. “They wanted to sell more to their large database of happy customers.
The old Globe umbrella was a group of 16 names, some originals, others built on existing designs. Nothing other than the word ‘just’ was common for the 16 names – and this was only in some of the words.”
Large started with a strategic audit where positioning, target user profiling and brand values were established. “To build a new brand is a two-sided affair,” explains Christoffer. “We really need to understand the company and what it offers. In return, it needs to define itself – usually the main reason for a rebrand.
“As a branding agency not only can we create and roll out the brand, we also operate as brand advisers in the beginning when the definition takes place. To get to understand the new brand we did a series of brand exercises internally as well as externally.”
There were several requirements for the new name for all of Globe’s companies. It had to be available as a URL address, because the company primarily operates online. The new brand name needed to sound classy, and be short, snappy and easy to remember. “We invented a clever name generator that output 5,000 new words based on a given number of syllables,” recalls Christoffer. “Our copywriter then picked the better ones and modified them to express the Globe values and offers.”At the same time, Large started on the visual part of the branding work. “First we flipped through hundreds of typefaces, which had a distinctive professional ‘specialist’ look about them,” explains Christoffer. “The inspiration was high luxury brands and products in fashion, perfume, and cars. The next step was to either modify the type used to write the word or to create graphic devices to go along the type.”
Meanwhile, Large’s name generator had come up with the sophisticated word Voyana. “Not only was this a completely new word, but it also sounded good, with elements of voyage and a foreign sounding ‘-na’ ending, as well as possessing visual impact,” says Christoffer.
Rolling out the brand fell into two phases. The first involved the design team testing the quality of the logo on various random dummy applications, such as post cards and ticket folders. “Besides kicking off the guidelines it also made us make decisions on images, colours, and secondary typefaces,” says Christoffer.
The second part saw a travel brochure and business cards produced, by this time with an established look-&-feel for the images used with the brand.
“As with the logo, they needed to show passion, specialty and professionalism,” says Christoffer. “We did this by literally getting close, zooming the subject, and bleaching the images a little. This made it look miles apart from all other travel competitors who use exactly the same bland palette of blue sky and white beaches.”
Large provided slim, free-styled, and friendly design guidelines, involving only a few rules on clear space and minimum size. In all, Globe spent about £30,000 on naming and brand design.
“As the strategic part of the branding work was done together with the client, we pretty much did everything right from the beginning,” says Christoffer. “Unfortunately we had to do a few more routes than we would have liked to due to the fact that someone else had taken a bespoke name. As the naming was a part of our deliveries, no extra costs were given to the client. We just had to work faster for a few days.”The client and Voyana’s staff were extremely happy, because the result was a brand that they felt a lot of ownership over and they could see the potential in having one name with the destinations below. “Their confidence grew as a company because they now looked like a major player,” says Christoffer.
Large, www.largedesign.com
Relaunch: Heinz soup range
Agency: Swamp
A new range of Heinz Soups had been developed ready for launch in winter 2004 – part of a relaunch of the whole Heinz soup range including packaging redesign and recipe enhancements.Swamp’s job began with Heinz asking how to communicate this fresh initiative to its customers, with an online message. The company has been retained as the online marketing agency for Heinz UK, with the opportunity to put forward online marketing ideas for all campaigns within Heinz.
“The soup market is becoming increasingly competitive with new flavours emerging all the time, combined with customers’ preferences for buying fresh rather than tinned soup,” says Paul Mallett, managing director of Swamp. “Heinz needed to refresh its range with more modern recipes and re-affirm to consumers that their soups are healthy, free of additives, flavourings, and colourings, and are indeed as good as ‘fresh’ soups.
“Most modern food brands have Web sites,” continues Mallett. “Heinz soup wanted to align themselves with brands more like ‘Innocent Drinks’ than with older preconceptions of their brand. Online rich-media advertising provided a great route to back up TV advertising in delivering the main campaign messages about natural, homegrown ingredients.”Step one involved planning rich-media advertising and online advertorial, followed by ideas for the Web site and online promotions including competitions.
The initial visual stage was next, with three ideas presented as mood boards and rough designs. Once this was finalized, the initial sketches of the main Web site pages followed. No style guide was in place – all the design for the online campaign was developed from packaging and the overall Heinz brand.
“We went through several ideas at the rough stage,” recalls Mallett. “We always budget for at least three different creative concepts at this stage. Once we had settled on a final design concept we were pretty much straight into production, with still graphics being worked up and signed off by the client prior to producing finished animated Flash graphics.The Heinz Soup brand team approved all work. “Our client was very pleased
with the Web site,” confirms Mallett. “Traffic levels have been great with good response to competitions and promotions. The development and promotion of the site will continue throughout 2005.”
Swamp, www.swampme.com
Written by Michael Burns, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006