Year2 Assignment3: Marks & Spencer

M&S

M&S Plan A

Reason for being in my shortlist

I am really interested in branding & identities. one of the blogs, Brandnew, I regualy check is all about branding & identities and shows before and after projects. I have also taken part in a few logo design challenges on 99designs. Doing this brief would allow me to have a more serious and focused attempt at creating a strong identity.

The Brief

Opening line:

Create a visual identity for our Plan A

campaign and develop campaign elements

to bring your identity to life!

Brief text:

Despite very high awareness of Plan A and the achievements this has delivered, our

customers recently told us that it felt like, “It is all about M&S talking about themselves, to us. We want to be involved, and we want helpful advice on how we can start to ‘do the right thing’ in our own lives.”

Your challenge is to take Plan A’s corporate success and use it as a springboard to inspire consumers to follow in our footsteps.

We need an icon, logo or family of identity elements that can work and come to life in

all of our consumer communication channels. This will be the shorthand through which our customers identify our Plan A products and services. We want this to be evocatively engaging in the way that the WWF panda logo is.

Create a visual identity for our Plan A campaign and develop campaign elements

to bring your identity to life!

A campaign would run across all manner of channels; these would include:

• Advertising – TV, Press, Outdoor, Radio.

• Windows – Can we use them in an interactive way with customers in 530 stores

across the UK?

• In Store – Where should we communicate? How should we communicate?

• M&S Magazine – We produce 6 issues a year with a 1m circulation and 4m readers.

• Online / CRM / PR / Social media – An approach for Plan A across all activity that is engaging, simple and makes common sense.

• Packaging and carrier bags – What could we do with our corporate media vehicles to communicate Plan A in an inspiring and engaging way?

You should choose one or more of these in which to bring your identity to life. How will you create clear and captivating engagement with M&S consumers?

My thoughts:

The Identity needs to be all about the connection M&S and the people share. Given the list of examples of where the brand will be displayed it needs to be very visually focused. The Identity need to be tailorable to a wide variety of different situations so should therefore be a simple strong concept. I should choose several of the media channels to show off how the Identity works as a whole.

Plan A is a product so I need to keep my target audience in mind and think how they would respond in their lives, it is there to boost M&S' image and allow customers to buy into an ideology without having to change there life a great deal.

Key words within the brief: (ordered as they appear in the brief)

• bring your identity to life!
• high quality
• source our products responsibly
• customers ...want to be involved
• take Plan A’s corporate success and use it as a springboard
• evocatively engaging
• simple – we need to make the complex clear, relevant and practical
• Inclusive
• Grounded
• Inspiring
• Authoritative, humble, complicit, honest and engaging

quick look at current brand

I subscribed to the Plan A mailing list and i just received this email from them

as you can see they are using a homemade style. the colour pallet is very earthy. they are associating themselves with well known eco brands. they email dose not give you a massive amount of things to do so you can take the whole thing in very quickly and if you want to do one of the things it presents you it will link you away to another page with further information. This for of hiding things is very good and I should use it in my identity.

The current logo is naff and is screaming for a graphical element to it.

M&S are great for ready meals now days and you can see the email links back into food so I should use Plan A to link back into the Main brand.

The website M&S Plan A dose not fit the brand at all in my mind but I should take the options it provides to customers and include them in my campaign.

Inspirational Brands

Sheffeild Honey Company

you can read an article on the brand here.

Initial Ideas

I think making a typeface for this plan A would work really well it give the company an identity element which can be easily tied into lots of different situations.

M&S is a classic brand and has a great heritage I could pull from some of there old styles/brands to make something contemporary. such as the clothing line St Michaels which was high quality clothing manufactured in Britain.