Author: Johnny Lyle

Creating brands and building businesses in the Themed Entertainment and attractions industry.
Brand Experience, branding

What are the eleven rules and three checkpoints for brilliant branding?

This is my checklist for starting to look at any branding project, in order to capture where the business and the brand already is.

As I’ve said in my work for Purple Circle Branding and on many occasions, branding is not about logos, it’s about a whole raft of ideas that come together to create an overall branded experience. Think of the logo as the marker to know you have arrived at the correct place and you’ll see its context. For me, the brand experience covers every aspect of an interaction or even a potential interaction – so therefore manage it.

In some particular order with the most important first.

1. What are its values and are they published for all to see. More importantly, is there evidence of them actually being lived throughout the organisation?

2. Is the merchandise/product/service supporting the brand experience and actually making it more positive or undermining it by not being as brilliant as it should be?

3. How does the brand speak and look visually? Is it on brand and consistent in every application that’s out there?

4. Has it defined its customers. Can you see from what you are looking at who it is they are expecting to engage with/sell to – and is it who they are actually targeting?

5. How does the website work. Does it look the part, publish the values and really live them?

6. Are the logos being used of a consistent feel. Not necessarily all in the same place and at the same size (as this is just consistent logo usage) but creating the same sort of effect wherever they appear?

7. Are they practicing CRM or MCR (maximising Customer relationships) by engaging with customers in every positive way possible?

8. Is there evidence of customer feedback. Do they use a product such as Feefo to ensure they are constantly engaging with their end users. In effect, are they engaging in dialogue or just giving them diatribe?

9.  Are employees engaged and leading at every level. Are they ‘chattering’ externally in a positive way using social media platforms? When you meet or speak to them are they brand advocates, or sales prevention officers?

10. Does the marketing collateral also talk the talk or does it drift towards the desperate in its sales message or continue to reinforce the brand, create the tribe and sell the dream.

11. Is the SEO on track too? A brilliant brand understands writing for SEO and is employing the best techniques throughout the experience.

This is all well and good. There are now only 11 things you need to manage to make a great brand but from this, you need to define three more final things.

1. What are the problems caused by low scores in any of these areas?

2. What does success in any of these areas look like?

3. Conversely, what does failure in any aspect look like?

These are obviously only rough guidelines and there ill need to be a variation for any specific sector but as a brand owner if you manage all of these well, you won’t be far off a great brand.

Here are a few examples of ones I’ve worked on over the years.

branding

Its Purple Circle’s 18th Birthday

In May 1991, three innocent young men started a branding business called Purple Circle at the tender ages of 24 years and with a grand total of 18 months post college work experience. It should have been a recipe for disaster, but somehow, we have kept going and kept growing. Now we’re 18 years old, so we’ve decided to produce a little website to celebrate and we’d love people to contribute so it becomes a showcase for ‘Shed Art’ across the world. Here’s the site and some of the early contributions, but more will be added every day in all sorts of different style and genres. www.shedloadsofideas.com All you need to do is download the template, be creative and then upload your idea to our server for us to showcase your brilliant work to the world. We’ll obviously make any links from your work to your site fully live and reciprocated. Thanks and have fun. John, Mich and Darren Now older and far, far more baldy

From Left to right: Darren Fisk, Michael Slack and John Lyle - Note the purple helmet in the middle back of shot
From Left to right: Darren Fisk, Michael Slack and John Lyle – Note the purple helmet in the middle back of shot
Brand for Nottingham, branding

Rebranding Margate – The Apprentice Way

Having watched The Apprentice last night for the first time, a few things struck me about the programme itself and the solutions that the contestants put forward as to how they would rebrand Margate.

I am no stranger to city county and place rebrands and was one of the people behind the controversial rebrand of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, being on the receiving end of tongue lashings from almost every outraged paper in the country for having the nerve to say that there was more to our city and county than just Robin Hood.

This is our version of events

I grew up in Margate and had two exceptionally happy years there moving away when I was only six years old. It would be very hard to argue that Margate still lives those glorious days in the 1970’s when Dreamland was at its boom and the new Arlington House flats being built were still hailed as a new way of living for Eastenders moving out from town to a new idyllic life by the sea.

A 60's dream gone slightly wrong
A 60's dream gone slightly wrong Shot by Sean Mason (Flickr)

I was in Margate again at the weekend for a few days with my kids, who are ten and twelve, and every single time we go there, we still love the place. Its simple British fun that has had the heart ripped out of it by a dreadful planning decision that put a new ‘out of town’ shopping monster between the main towns of Thanet and destroyed all the others in the process.

But Margate is fighting back. We walked around the old town which has some cool new boutiques and interesting arty stores. It also has some beautiful little shops available for rent for almost nothing. They just need an independent retailer to come in and make a success of it. If you can’t do this with 100SqM of retail space and a rent of £3k per year, you don’t deserve to stay trading anyway. Perhaps subsidised rents would allow the town to be reborn through this growing retail sector.

Margate - A town fighting back
Margate - A town fighting back - Shot by Lynn Jackson Flickr

Margate has a lovely feel to it, if you ignore the slightly tired façade. Offering a family appeal is the perfect answer and so I think Kate and her team were spot on. There was no need to rebrand it as MarGAYte as there is already a thriving gay community there, so what’s the commercial sense in aiming all your marketing money at just one niche. They could have done that easily with some clever PR and a few nicely designed ads.

None of them did actually rebrand the town though.

They just produced campaigns that may drive a few tourists through the door. A rebrand of any town or city only works if you have the whole area behind it. It’s the process of getting to the new logo and the newly agreed strategy that is important a by getting everyone to unite behind a common flag, they agree to talk the place up in the same way and become more able to defend it for what it is and promote it for what it could become.

The designers behind the losing team’s route should be shot for allowing a client to give them such a bad brief. ‘we need a brochure in 20 minutes’ will never work, lying about a reason for white space by the ‘client’ is even worse. Clients invariably get the work they deserve. If you leave a designer 20 minutes to produce a brochure with no distinctive or iconic pictures, too much mediocre copy and someone with no eye for design overseeing it, its always going to be a disaster that should have been prevented.

But the feeling I was left with overall, was why do you need to be that unpleasant in business to win. Surely you can be decent with each other and still succeed by championing what each other does best rather than laying traps into which each can fall and then celebrating when they do?

I was left hating the programme for its nasty snidy attitude.

I was left still loving and defending Margate – for all its faults – and looking at a council team who should be the ones taken out and ridiculed for letting Margate as a seaside town, sell its soul to the retail ‘gods’ who owned the site a few miles up the road.

I can’t imagine I’ll be tuning in again

Brand Experience, branding

A stunning article on new brand thinking

This is a stunning article from FusionBrand in Malaysia, commenting on the poor year had by Ogilvy and Mather in China and the reaction of their chairman TB Song.

Read it here

What it says to me is that the future for branding and advertising agencies is a very uncertain one unless they begin to offer measurable ROI on what they do for their clients. This means measurability everywhere.

Rewarding advertising agencies by how much space they buy for you is a dead model. Rewarding them by how much sales revenue they generate will help sharpen their ideas in a massive way, but only if they are allowed to control more of the experience than just the televisual element.

As a design and brand agency it was traditional that we could change logos and create wonderful new design literature, websites, direct mail and all sorts of marketing ‘collateral’ that would win over clients the world over.

But those days are gone. We have to change the core of the businesses now, in order to change the brand.

Brands are born in the customer experience and not in the logo you choose to hang above it. The logo can only ever be a symbol that the customer has arrived in the right place to enjoy their branded experience. Change the logo in isolation and you change nothing. Change the customer experience and mark it with a new logo and you could indeed change the world for that customer.

Unless we have enlightened brand owners who allow designers to enjoy and subsequently manage the ongoing brand experience, one of us will disappear. The old adage ‘if two people in a business always agree, then one of them is unnecessary’ rings truer now than ever before.

Branding as topic that has been fiercely debated and that everyone has an opinion on (right or wrong). Done well, it changes the basis of a business forever. Done badly, it’s a poor old waste of money that brings the industry into disrepute and has been practiced by many since Introducing Monday and Consignia started the trend downwards with the most pointless and superficial logo changes masquerading as rebrands.

So, to all enlightened clients feel free to get in contact and I’ll show you the difference between a new logo, a pointless change and a really brilliant piece of branding that will directly benefit your business and its customers in the long term.

Andy Hanselman, branding

He can’t get no satisfaction

Rather excellent article from Andy Hanselman about why satisfaction is never enough.

www.andyhanselman.com

Have a read get commenting

branding

Innovate or its gonna be roadkill

It seems obvious to most of us that unless we innovate with our brands we die, but why do so many organisations and brand owners slowly drift into mediocrity? Branding is far more than changing logos, it’s about renewing the entire presentation of an organisation to its customers or agreed target audience, who may become customers of the future.

The Little Chef brand in UK is a great example. Their Olympic breakfast used to be exceptional but year by year it became less Olympian and more local track event. Bits started dropping off and others became ‘extras’ pretty soon a simple breakfast became a £10 plus extortion.

By the time they drafted in ‘expert’ Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck fame, who is quite obviously a brilliant chef, but as far removed from a motorway service as could possibly be imagined, the cheese had most definitely moved. It was so far gone that no amount of PR could bring it out of hiding.

Over almost ten years there was a generational change (or neglect) that meant an entire new audience grew up NOT using Little Chef as their roadside café of choice.

The rather excellent site Motorway services info rates Motorway services over a number of different ratings to do with cleanliness, friendliness and pricing and then rather weirdly. gives them a burger related rating.

Tebay in Northumberland always wins because the owners – as it is amazingly, still privately owned – care enough to keep renewing their offer and ensuring their staff are behaving as they would want, the prices are what they would be happy to pay and the showers are ones they would even use themselves.

Bottled water in most services is actually much more expensive than petrol or diesel (at over £1.50 per litre) and in these value aware times, most people are wising up and either bringing their own ‘value’ products (from home, from Aldi or even from taps) that the likes of Moto will soon start to seriously struggle unless they renew, and renew fast.

I drive thousands of miles on Britain’s motorways and for me the biggest mover of cheese (and pickle and ham etc etc) has been Marks and Spencer. The arrival of their brand in services has brought a new price structure and a level of quality only seen before in the likes of Tebay.

There is nothing new in marketing and ever was thus. The clearest example we were given whilst training in marketing at college was the Swiss watch industry being decimated by Swatch. They just didn’t see the competition coming from electronics. Whilst they haven’t quite died, the volumes of mechanical Swiss watches is far smaller than in the 60’s.

Brands have to innovate, in any industry. The road to LONG TERM branding success is littered with glorious failures and quiet disappearances, but if it can happen at the roadside, where could it happen to you and your brand – more importantly, what are you doing to ensure that you move the cheese before the others realise it has even moved.

Ps if you want read the ‘Who moved my cheese’ book that I refer to in this article, click below.

Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson

branding

Essential reading for the branding expert

I have compiled a list of what I believe are the essential books about branding and its related areas. It may not be an exhaustive list, so please feel free to let me know others I should be reading too.

https://johnnylyle.co.uk/best-branding-books/

and this is the list of sites that I love too

https://johnnylyle.co.uk/blogs-and-sites-that-i-love/

branding

It’s great when your own work comes home

We have just had an application from a brilliant potential employee. The most focussed presentation we have received in 18 years of running Purple Circle – a branding and graphic design business. When you get 50 speculative applications per week, to have one this good restores your faith in humanity.

She even used one of our own quotes that she found n the web, summarising what branding is all about to show she had read through all of our materials and then demonstrated it by allowing her own brand to pervade everything!

Our summary of what branding is all about.

“Branding is far more than simply sticking logos on things; rather, it is about an organisation – however big or small – setting and managing a tone for its entire communications and ensuring that the core values of the company pervade every aspect of the business. If you can do this, it doesn’t matter whether you are speaking to your team or to your customers, you can create a brilliant brand.”

Andy Hanselman, branding

CRM is not enough MCR is getting closer though

I was speaking to Andy Hanselman today about the much talked about topic of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). He has the view that this is just not enough. What we should all be looking at is Maximising Customer Relationships (or MCR). Branding has become such a wide subject now that it is far, far more than just doing logos, it’s about every single aspect of your customer interaction.

A system that maximises customer relationships seems to be a far more sensible and holistic way of dealing with your customers.

If you look at your existing customers, are you genuinely delivering them all of the available products or services you offer? Or more likely, are they using you for one or two of the things you can do for them and buying others from others?

In an article about agency survival by Alain Thys, he gives us some great pointers about what we should be doing. Perhaps the most important of these is making ourselves accountable for the work we produce and delivering a sensible ROI for our clients. He argues that many of the reward models for agencies are just wrong, because they reward overspending and not results.

At the Marketing Live conference in Leeds a few weeks ago, one of the main topics discussed was again, about agency rewards. I was the only person who held my hand up saying we had been doing this for years. As an agency, Purple Circle has always put its money where its mouth is and for the right projects will either take an investment in the company, or find a reward system that is based on results.

Duncan Bird, a long time friend of ours is at Anomaly in New York and they have built their entire business model on this idea. They not only create brilliant work, they invest in the business and take a shareholding. They are truly rewarded for their work and this is the future for an agency.

Awards

The Drum Marketing Awards Pictures

 

The very lovely Laura from Aura PR in Scotland presenter of the first award
The very lovely Laura from Aura PR in Scotland presenter of the first award

 

John Lyle with Drum Marketing Award Grand Prix for BeWILDerwood
John Lyle with Drum Marketing Award Grand Prix for BeWILDerwood

 

 

 

John Lyle with Richard Draycott Editor of the Drum and all round good man
John Lyle with Richard Draycott Editor of the Drum and all round good man
Angela Lawrence of Itero Marketing - Emerging marketeer of the year - Who was my fellow Whooper at the awards as neither of us knew many people there!
Angela Lawrence of Itero Marketing - Emerging marketeer of the year - Who was my fellow Whooper at the awards as neither of us knew many people there!
Keith Vernege of the COI Publications - Chairman of the judges and obviously a very wise man
Keith Vernege of the COI Publications - Chairman of the judges and obviously a very wise man

As promised, here are the pictures from the awards the other night.

Firstly I have to explain the unshaven look. Its a lucky beard. We had an amazing few weeks, winning new business and both my daughter and son winning major football matches. It couldn’t have been anything else but the lucky beard, so it had to stay for these awards.

And the reason I have no dress shirt on is not because I’m trying to be cool, its because I forgot my cufflinks and had to wear the scruffy linen shirt i’d had on all day!

Considering I went to the dinner on my own, not really knowing many people, I ended up chatting to loads of people and having a thoroughly good night out. I guess it’s always better when you win stuff.

When I was standing around in the bar, nursing a beer on my own, Angela Lawrence from Itero came over and just started gabbing away to me. We agreed that if either of us was lucky enough to win an award, we would whoop and holler for each other.

We both won!

for even more pics, have a look here

www.thedrummarketingawards.com/gallery/