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.

Year2 Assignment3: Green & Blacks

I stated a few posts back that I would look at the 5 briefs in my shortlist in a little more detail. I said there that I would;

• picking the briefs apart looking for key words and paraphrasing the briefs into 1 short paragraph
• thinking of a few responses that I could do for each brief
• look at a small amount of examples of similar projects & campaigns

so going through my briefs in alphabetical order I am going to start with Green & Blacks.

Green & Blacks

Reason for being in my shortlist

When I read the brief it looked as if there was a lot of potential for large scale and innovative advertising. I felt like with this brief I could really innovate and come up with something really cool to do.

I am also personally interested in how as a designer you can influence peoples opinions, which is what this brief is about.

Green & blacks have a great colour pallet in there products which would be fun to work with.

The Brief

opening line:

Give new consumers a motivating

reason to trade up to Green & Black’s.

Brief text:

We ... wish to develop a marketing campaign that gives new consumers a motivating

reason to trade up to Green & Black’s above the other premium chocolate brands out

there. The creative challenge is to recreate the buzz behind the Green & Black’s brand to encourage even more consumers to try us and fall in love with us.

One of the biggest challenges we face (for both recruitment and retention) as we try to grow is in encouraging consumers to step up to Green & Black’s and pay that little bit more for us. Historically, we’ve found that getting people to taste our chocolate is more likely to get them to buy the brand.

my thoughts:

As I said before to me this brief is all about doing something big. just look at these quotes "getting people to taste our chocolate" and "recreate the buzz behind the Green & Black’s brand" to me these demand a campaign that is any combination of;

• Large scale
• Interactive
• People Friendly
• Motivational
• Inspiring
• Viral
• an event
• Covert

This brief is more about an idea than a physical series of posters etc. This is not a hard sell.

key words within the brief (ordered as they appear in the brief)

• Organic
• Rich deep colour
• Intense taste
• Next generation of consumers (note: this means it should be a youthful idea)
• Growth, especially from other areas of our brand portfolio
• Infectious brand idea
• Dove campaign for Real Beauty
• Creativity
• Be bold

Dove

Dove have had some amazing advertising campaigns. They have worked they raising awareness to very human issues that are becoming a problem. The issues they target concern beauty, which is what Dove products are used for, so they therefore promote Dove products as well as the brand.

Campaign for Real Beauty had the following advert

The advert features children which appeals to mothers, who would fall into Doves target audience. it pointing a finger at the modern concept of beauty. This is a really clever advert and I think that how all the elements point back the Dove costumers is a really powerful thing which I could use in my project.

another part of the Campaign for Real Beauty was the Dove Evolution film. the aim of the film was the reveal the process that goes into making adverts containing images of beautiful women. when this was released the issue was already know about but not in a great detail. The effect of the campaign was that there was a massive surge in media coverage in the issue and a load of free advertising for Dove.

This is a very short video and it spread as a viral. I think the choice in music in both videos is really important as it really impacts the way you feel about the piece of video you are seeing.

Initial ideas

I have not had that many ideas about what I could potentially produce for this but I do know that Easter is one of the biggest times of year for UK chocolate buying and consumption so something to do with Easter would work really well.

I think it would be important to latch onto some key ideas and values, like how dove did. though just imitating them is not worth it.

engaging with peoples imagination is a great way to get people to talk about what your doing. so maybe something that is connected with peoples sense of nostalgia about chocolate. Charlie and the chocolate factory etc.

the point is to get people who already like chocolate to upgrade so some kind of visual comparison. such as 2 statues made of chocolate, one from cheap chocolate one from Green & Blacks.