Brand power
Article Date: Apr 21 2005
Growing the brand
In 1994, ex-Marine Neil Laughton walked into Alex Ashworth’s office with £250 and asked him to create a logo for his new business. Because he was a friend of a friend, Ashworth could not really turn him down. The design he developed has taken Office Projects from £30,000 re-fits to the £8.5 million job of managing Rolls Royce’s new office, factory and showroom at Goodwood.
‘It was a clear name, but a bit dull,’ recalls Ashworth, a branding specialist at Manifest. ‘We wanted to express the nature of their business, so we put the O and the P in an office setting. It was an effective visual identity, though a complex one.’
Ashworth and Laughton kept talking about the strategic and creative development of the brand. Still working on a tight budget, the next step was to develop a brochure and other sales tools. Ashworth came up with a project sheet that could either be sent out by itself or could be bound into a proposal.
By the summer of last year, after completing BMW’s Goodwood site, Laughton accepted that Office Project’s visual identity was looking tired and was failing to reflect its new capabilities in running the design, building and furnishing of commercial interiors.
‘We want to position ourselves as a more professional organisation in line with our growth and we want to get to the top level,’ he says. ‘We are still smallish, but we are competing for large contracts. So we have to let our prospective customers know we are a viable option, as well as third parties like architects.’
So he agreed to a radical review of the brand costing £35,000. ‘We have changed the logo, which was quite traumatic, and have a new website. We had an out-of-date brochure, which did not reflect where we now are as people. So we have given the brand some personality, explaining where we have come from and where we are going, rather than just discussing what we have achieved in the last couple of years.’
Laughton, 41, is hoping that this investment will take Office Projects into a new cycle of growth. Turnover currently stands at £9 million and he is hoping to lift this to £25 million in the next three-to-five years.
Watershed
The visual identity of Office Projects is now more appropriate for a target market of larger customers like BMW, says Ashworth. ‘We took a complex image and distilled it, creating a marque that expresses the direction and purpose of the business in a more and simple direct way.’
And for the first time, sales material has a statement of intent. ‘The new brochure still includes project details, but it also talks about the philosophy of the team that is going to make everything happen. Businesses that are becoming medium-sized often find this hard. Maybe it is because the founders want to hold on to their vision and key messages. It is a watershed when they are committed to paper.’
‘Neil is still the figurehead for Office Projects, but the idea is to allow sales people to fulfil his role. We can help arm them to do their job, but ultimately it is going to be down to them.’
Need to know – Brand tips for SMEs
- Invest in design – a picture says a thousand words.
- Listen to your gut feeling - don’t let designers bamboozle you into following fashion.
- Don’t keep changing things. Repeat them over and over.
- Plan to spend four per cent to eight per cent of your turnover in marketing. Strangely, it works.
- Write a list of all the possible things you could do. Then focus on three.
- You can’t work in isolation, so share the plan with any sales folk.
- Building a database of potential customers is your most important marketing activity.
- Don’t advertise unless you have the budget for 100 adverts. Even
- then, only buy ten in advance.
- Nothing hacks customers off more than them thinking you don’t love them anymore.
- Be fun in your tone, be pushy in your close.
Source : Branding consultancy Loewy
