Website: http://www.chaptershotels.co.uk

You can also find Chapters Hotel & Restaurant on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook.

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Website: http://www.fudgefancies.co.uk

Michael, the founder of Fudge Fancies, is the eldest son of three children. As the eldest Michael enjoyed a lot of quality time and attention from his grandparents and had a particularly close relationship with his maternal grandmother, Jean, whom he spent a lot of time in his early years. Michael’s first spark of interest in cooking came from watching his grandmother bake her legendary fudge.

Michael loves the care and precision that is needed in creating the perfect piece of fudge as opposed to his usual style of cooking which requires no measurements! This need for precision only encouraged Michael to strive for perfection and after trial and error he has achieved his goal with Fudge Fancies.

Michael now regularly sells his gourmet fudge at various farmer’s markets across the North East of England including Saltburn and Stokesley. Michael believes the markets are a brilliant way of testing new flavours, such as his upcoming Cherry Trifle, as people are always more than willing to try a sample of his scrumptious fudge. With his recipe book getting fuller by the day, Michael believes he has more to surprise and delight his customers!

Project Details.

Brand Design, Brand Development, Marketing Support, Website design, WordPress CMS Development, Social Media Strategy and Support.

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Stories are art, crafted to take the reader on a journey designed by the author to deliver a meaningful emotional experience. This seminar, and I recommend you seek out one of Robert’s London seminars if you have the chance, provided me with a rich learning experience that helps me in my desire to understand better the correlation between our emotions and values and the brands we buy.

I believe brands need to be storytellers. Using craft and structure to reveal the complex associations of values, benefits and features to their audiences using language they intrinsically understand and connect with. Their stories must tell the simple truth of their existence, helping their audience to see clearly their value, design and importantly create a platform for long term engagement.

It is in the storytelling therefore that some brands fail. They offer the same quality of service or product as successful brands, and yet they don’t translate this into their own success. They fail to capture the imagination of their audience and we must ask ourselves why?

In tough market conditions many brand owners are forced to treat their brands as commodities, pressured by the demand for sales and a focus from the boardroom on buying short term brand loyalty. This has two long term implications for the brand. Firstly it can turn a premium brand in to a value brand that is traded (which isn’t sustainable) rather than positioned, and secondly it makes the brand compete with other brands in the wallet and not in the minds of the audience.

Whilst audiences want brands to recognise and reward loyalty, we as brand owners need to inspire them too. If all we do is reflect and remind them that money is always the key driver in their life, we’re letting them down. The brand owner must focus beyond the effective management of their marketing budgets and simply trying to buy customer loyalty.

We must convince audiences that when value in the economy is shaky the values of the brand remain constant, offer tangible benefits and give them something to believe in and sometimes aspire towards having.

“But the majority of brands have to deal or die” is the answer from many brand owners but this simply isn’t true. Some brands, with very little money, have managed to engage their audience and developed deep emotional relationships that inform, entertain and differentiate.

They have become storytellers, that enable their audience to connect with the values of the brand and absorb meaning through the craft of their brand story.

So what are the components of an effective story:

1) Unlike stories that are fiction brands must tell the truth of their existence. Why do they exist in the world, to serve what purpose for their audience? Here the reason is all important. We want to create (A) because (B) needs it to enable them to do (C). A brand story, in its telling, should smoothly transport the audience from A to C, be utterly transparent and feel right. You know when your been strung a line, you feel it. It you don’t believe it, you can be sure your audience wont either!

2) Frame your story to reflect accurately (without dwelling on it) the pain in your audience’s life you wish to remove with your brand. I use the analogy of people reading horoscopes. Those people that believe them look for themselves in the writing of the horoscope.

If they recognise themselves or a character trait or a situation they are experiencing they instantly develop a deep bonds of trust with the writer because “They get me!” It shows your audience that you understand them intimately. Adversely, if you simply scratch the surface of understanding your audience how can you hope to translate learning into meaningful products or services?

3) Craft your message using all your learning about your audience to be instantly recognisable and understandable. You must speak the same language as your audience or risk them missing the point of your brand.

4) Take your audience with you on a journey that has a clear destination in mind. The characters of a story are all moving toward some desired outcome, every action either positive or negative will move them toward it. So too must your brand story, it must help your audience towards a deeper understanding of the values, benefits and features of your brand and not simply make un-connected statements regardless of them being true.

5) Entertain if possible but at the very least inform your audience so they can differentiate your brand from others. The example I always refer too is Blendtec. Their blender may not be a sexy brand but that didn’t stop them thinking about and translating the values and benefit of their blender into something that is both fun, entertaining and informative.

“Will it Blend” started life as a campaign and has grown into a community where the owner of the company asks the simple question, “Will it Blend?”. It being everything from industrial magnets to hockey pucks! Delivered through YouTube, short video’s of them attempting to blend a whole raft of objects entertains but subtly re-enforces the benefits of the brand that being that Blendtec blenders are very robust, dependable blenders.

Reflecting on the great depression of the 20s and 30s, audiences going to the movies actually grew. People found the money and went to the movies to escape the harsh reality of living and for the 90 minutes telling of a story found a world crafted for them by screenwriters, authors and play writers.

Audience’s today don’t want the constant reminder of the frugality’s of living. They need value of course but they also want to be told a story and believe in something. They want to know we care about them and not just the pound they carry around in their pocket.

Thankfully our tool chests are brimming with tools to help us carve out rich seams of knowledge and understanding relating to our audience that feeds our strategic thinking. That’s not all, add to this the torrent of real time feedback being generated across social media spaces about our products and some would say we’ve never had it so good. How could we fail to build strong brands?

Sadly, the truth is many brands are over communicated and tragically miss their mark and that’s a real shame, because it needn’t be so.

Seth Godin, recently posted about the purpose of a book cover was to create maximum impact. Reading it I remembered looking at some old movie posters and thinking that one of the hardest jobs in the world, in my mind, is describing a 90 minute movie in one sentence without loosing any of the impact of the narrative. Talk about a tough gig, big respect goes to those guys!

The one that sticks in my mind (though there are many others) was the theatre poster for Platoon. An iconic image with the line, “The first casualty of war is innocence.” It worked on me and millions of other who were draw in to see it.

Distilling a message out of all that marketing data without losing its impact and relevance is something we’re going to need to become better at because space and time is tight in people minds.

Marketers need to become effective miners and sievers of data. They need to measure information against the essence of their brand and shake out the insights and meaning that enables them to reduce and purify their message.

The strongest brands have the simplest message.

I’ve planned a few focus group sessions in the past when I was part of the team that re-branded Frisp Crisps and I have to say I remember them as being interesting and generating some useful feedback, particularly that the crisps were considered as being quite ‘foody’ and filling, more than a snack. That fed into the decision that new ‘foody’ such as Buttered Jacket Potato & Mature Cheddar would fit with our customers’ perception of the crisp brand.

It was also useful to see them place packaging in order of perceived quality, heavy gauge paper type bags being clearly seen as a premium bag and the rather flimsy film packaging of own label brands being a value brand. This was all good stuff for the re-brand, and we felt some real insights into how people relate to products came out of those focus groups.

I can’t help thinking though that 80% of what came out of the focus groups was understanding we already had and that’s the crux for me really. We are taught that to understand we must ask questions which is all well and good but when we consider asking a question we’ve normally considered a number of potential answers and are looking for verification, it’s human nature to do so. Do some of the answers generated by focus group attendees therefore reflect what they think or what the brand manager thinks?

Like focus groups, social networks and communities enable us to observe and engage with our target audience. Some of the biggest brands in the world, Mattel being one, have embraced the principle idea that listening to what their target audience talk about (Manly themselves and their families) will deliver as yet undiscovered insights and prompt questions that the brand team have not yet thought of relating to their products and importantly about their target audiences lives. The community in question for Mattel is ‘The Playground’, a private community for the mothers of young children.

I’d argue that the anonymity of talking freely online empowers people to say what the truly think without the influence of our own ‘self awareness’, of wanting people to perceive us in the way we want to be perceived. This will reshape how we learn about our target audiences but will this replace traditional focus groups or market research? I think not.

Social media isn’t a new broom to make a clean sweep of traditional marketing metrics. It’s offers brand managers another dimension of metrics, that will keep our thinking honest and our minds focused on our audience.

Join Media Week editor Steve Barrett and news editor Tristan O’Carroll as they discuss the effect of the financial crisis on media with Google’s Mark Howe, ZenithOptimedia’s Steve King, the IPA’s Moray MacLennan and other leading names from the industry.

Click here to go to the download link.

You want a logo that will say a few things about you, what you do – hey – maybe even where you’re going in these crazy times. So, what does the cyan and white sphere above say? Unequivocally, it says: I am another company with a hollowed-out spherical logo…

New Barclaycard Logo

The latest in a long line of rebranded financial corporations is Barclaycard which, as of yesterday, officially sports a new identity courtesy of Brand Union. In the last decade or so, countless large corporations have smoothed off their edges and sanded down their corners via a rebrand. “Look how soft and round and approachable we are,” seems to run the thinking.

Indeed, according to the designers, the new Barclaycard identity aims to convey a calm, confident exterior while being warm and vibrant on the inside… and that the globe motif represents a “chip” being released from the constraints of the plastic card and welcomed in by new, exciting methods of payment.

The logo cost £600k (part of a £1.5m identity makeover) and while we don’t need to go down the path of bemoaning the fee, what does the new identity actually say apart from what we already know: that many companies are now global businesses (hence the globe shape) and that they’re highly networked organisations (hence the curly bits that wrap the sphere).

Perhaps more worryingly, it says far less about what differentiates the company from its competitors (it happens to be Barclaycard, it could be any number of brands) and more about how achingly similar corporate logos have become. In trying to say they’re about the new, the modern, the global, they’re in fact revealing a willingness to simply blend in with everyone else.

Here are some other familiar spherical jobs. It really is one world out there isn’t it?

[svgallery name="Post Logos"]

Top to bottom: Sony Ericsson, BT, AT&T

Original Article - http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/an-ordinary-world/

Offline advertising is showing diminishing returns. McKinsey predicts that by 2010, traditional television advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

This is partly because online media is growing at the expense of offline. A UK survey by Media Week showed that time spent for both live/realtime TV and teletext tv decreased by 1% and 2% respectively between 2006 and 2007, while internet usage by 50%; an IDC study of U.S. consumer online behavior found that the Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours), almost twice as much time as spent watching television (16.4 hours), and more than eight times as much time as spent reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).

It is partly because of the rise in ad avoidance strategies. DVRs owners (according to an IBM survey) watch at least 50% of television programming on replay, thus avoiding television advertising. It is partly because of a major decline in public trust in brands. People trust people more than they trust the media. In a 2006 survey of U.S. consumers, Forrester found that 83% of respondents trusted friends’ opinion, but only 75% trust product reviews in a newspaper, magazine or TV. (Groundswell, Charline Li and Josh Bernhoff).

The answer would seem to be to move the business online. More than half of the world’s Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, according to Nielsen. The web also seems to offer promising growth for advertisers: Nielsen estimates that spending on online advertising will escalate at 19.2 per cent annually till 2012 and will surpass the TV advertising budget in the US in the next decade.

But advertising on the web poses challenges. Online banner click-throughs on Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have declined from 0.75% to 0.27% according to ad monitoring firm Eyeblaster.

Paid search ads now represent the lion’s share of online ad spending. Contextual search ads are great for selling specific factual propositions (flights to Malaga, hotels in Brussels) but they are less effective at communicating emotion. In a recent report from The Wharton School, marketing professor Patti Williams observes that it’s unclear how a company like Crest can leverage search advertising: “How many people are going online to search for toothpaste? It’s not [obvious that] a little ad on the screen is going to attract them. For the biggest bulk of media spending, online is just hard to figure out. The Internet is not that good at big brand-building objectives, so there are a lot of companies struggling with a way to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity Google and other searches offer.”

A 2007 global Nielsen survey found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78 percent of the study’s respondents. And there are perhaps clues for advertisers in the shift of online consumers to social networking sites. In the UK, social networks overtook webmail by percentage of visits in 2007, with social networks accounting for 5.17% of all Internet visits compared to 4.98% for email services. Advertisers want to follow consumers but that’s difficult. When you are chatting to a friend the last thing you want is to be interrupted with a clumsy brand message. Privacy settings in most networks preclude direct marketing. Facebook recently announced that it was opening up key pages to allow for contextual advertising.

So how do Brands engage with the consumer in a way that provokes conversation and endorsement? The most successful strategies for engagement with social media is for a brand do something which allows people to pass on a key message about your brand.

People can talk about you for three reasons:

You have given them useful information.
H&R Block set out to build awareness of their online tax return offering by creating content customised for channels. The budget was 5% of their annual digital spend only 0.5% of their total ad spend. They grew awareness 52%, and saw an 11% growth in tax services business, feeding net income which rose to $544m from an $86m loss the previous year.

The switch, announced by Pizza Hut this week, is intended to flag up its revamped pasta menu, supported by an ad campaign created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. It is likely, however, that the Pizza Hut name will be reinstated at the 30 outlets after the year-long drive.

by Gemma Charles, Marketing, Brand Republic.

Jim Prior, managing director of branding agency The Partners, described the tactic as ‘boring’. ‘It is a bit of a puerile idea; the sort of thing the chair-man’s wife comes up with at Sunday lunch,’ he said. ‘It is na•ve, too; it is hardly as though the change is from something unexciting to something that is more exciting.’

Vanessa Cohen, partner at branding consultancy Prophet, said the change would garner press coverage, but added: ‘I find it hard to believe it won’t cause confusion and dilute the strength of the brand.’

Pizza Hut’s marketing director, Claudia Nicholls-Magielsen, said the change was designed to alter people’s perceptions of the brand, and denied it was an attempt to target health-conscious consumers.

Feedback from the forums:

It seems like a good idea. People will really notice a name change, and it fits the existing brand. David Parish

I imagine Pizza Hut hopes to gain publicity, then bring the name back ‘by popular demand’. Matt Saunders

I work at Pizza Hut, and I agree with a lot of the comments here; the brand is really confused at the moment. Shib Hussain

Read full article and other related articles by click on the link below:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/851329/Pizza-Hut-name-switch-lambasted-puerile/

Brand Republic took to the streets and found that some members of the public aren’t impressed with Pizza Hut’s rebrand and want more than a name change to persuade them to go in, while others labelled it a good idea….read more…

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/852409/Brand-Republic-Video-Publics-mixed-reaction-Pizza-Hut-rebrand/

By Michael Nutley, editor-in-chief of NMA (Original Article)

At least, that’s the story. And there are other examples of this kind of agency thinking; JWT again, tasked with selling more high quality flour, invented the Mr Kipling brand and sold the flour in the form of cakes.

Sometime between then and now, the advertising industry changed. It went from being the preserve of generalists who solved their clients’ business problems, to specialists who made ads. But in the digital sector at least, that’s changing.

This was one of the key themes that emerged as I was working on the introduction to NMA’s Top 100 Interactive Agencies guide, published on 27.09.07. Agency heads across the spectrum of creative and media talked about clients asking for a different kind of work.

The most powerful force driving this change is the much-discussed decline in interruptive advertising. As interactive media give people ever-more powerful tools to control their media consumption, advertising needs to change. In order to persuade people to let it through their filters, it needs to become more useful, to perform a service.

There have already been some great examples, including Modem Media’s site for Kraft that suggested recipes to busy mothers; Persil’s site offering ideas for kids activities during the school holidays, again aimed at mothers; and the baby development emails offered by nappy manufacturers.

The second driver is technology. According to Alastair Duncan, MD of agency MRM Worldwide, the desktop is now seen as a legitimate marketing domain, thanks to the rise of widgets and other web applications that push information to people.

Interactive agencies are ideally placed to take advantage of these trends. For a start they’re used to changing technologies and business models; their practices aren’t as solidified as those of their offline counterparts. They’re also used to interaction; everything they do is based on getting a response from its audience. And as a result they’re closer to those audiences and have an understanding of them at a very detailed level.

But this doesn’t mean that their success in this developing sector is guaranteed. Speaking at NMA’s Online Marketing 07 show back in June, planner and blogger Russell Davis was asked who he thought would lead the way in digital marketing in the future. His response was that it wouldn’t be digital agencies but interaction designers, “people who can create something useful”.

There are other problems too. Agencies are traditionally paid for what they produce or on commission for the media they buy; the thinking behind it is done for free. But while one of the characteristics of this web app approach to marketing is that there is no media, no one has yet established a satisfactory way of charging for ideas.

There’s also the question of the service’s lifetime. Web apps offer a way of maintaining constant communication with customers, and could spell an end to campaign-based marketing. But at least with campaigns, once they’re over you can move on to the next one.

With web apps, if they’re successful you have to keep supporting them, which takes resource away from the next thing, because the potential damage done by taking something away from people can outweigh the benefits of giving it to them in the first place.

However, the potential rewards for clients are dramatic. The web app that everyone holds up as a model is of course Nike+, the link between Nike running shoes and Apple’s iPod that allows you to download the stats on your run to your computer and set up challenges with other runners. To date over 100,000 challenges issued between runners using the site.

What’s more if, as seems likely, media continue to move towards on-demand models where ad avoidance is the norm, service-type advertising may become vital, rather than just desirable.