Apr 12, 2022
Live version of Bad Selection by The Armed from the EP Adult Swim Festival '21
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Live version of Bad Selection by The Armed from the EP Adult Swim Festival '21
Dan Greene & Stefan Christensen - Why I Was A Burglar
C/Site Recordings
2020
AN ITERATION by The Armed from the album ULTRAPOP - Video starring David Hayter
Summer 2024: The Armed on tour in Europe |X| REFRACT
Godzilla #23 (1979) splash page by Herb Trimpe and Dan Greene
100-up North End see off Athletic
100-up North End see off Athletic
The Hillmen strengthened their grip on second place in the league and closed the gap on leaders Runcorn Linnets with a dogged victory at Surrey Street on Saturday. Athletic came into the game in third place (where they remain) but North End were always the side who looked most likely to score.
Glossop North End 3, Ashton Athletic 0 North West Counties Premier Division
Match Report– Jonathan…
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Making brands stick
Once the critics lose interest in the comments section, the brand video stops getting hits and the all-agency briefings come to an end – this is when the challenging realities of getting a brand into the world begin.
Whether a charity, telco or banking institution, the following five post-launch considerations and actions can help make your new brand stick (and hopefully prosper).
1. Alignment between brand and propositions
No new news on this one, but if the business isn't organised to deal with a new brand, the road from here on in gets bumpy.
A big win is getting the propositions and brand teams in the same room to figure out if the stuff in the pipeline can deliver against the ambition. If the brand is geared to engage through amazing new services and products, but your customer offers and experiences reflect the old brand, then no amount of new wallpaper is going to distract customers from spotting it.
Action:
Consider updating the briefing tools. By putting the brand ambition front and centre in the briefs, planners and proposition mangers have tangible ways to judge new products, services and offers.
2. Consistency of quality
A common challenge when launching a new brand (and in fact, maintaining momentum with an older one) is ensuring the content is right. The natural inclination is to make sure the visual bits are all in the right places, and so they should be, but this won't make the brand connect with customers.
Action:
Invite staff from across the business to brand surgeries to teach them the role of the new brand. Help them understand how the brand must engage, what sort of offers it must create and why this brand is different from the old one. With this sense of understanding and empowerment, they can live the brand and ultimately drive up quality throughout the business.
3. Shift focus from visual and verbal to experience
If your new brand is focused on how it sounds and looks rather than how it feels, you'll end up with handsome posters, but little else.
In order to create a coherent story for customers and to deliver more engaging experiences beyond typical media touch points, brands must evolve to adopt high level experience principles. These philosophies not only inform the visual, but the behavioural, across both the physical and digital estate. And when partnered with a new proposition, should create an experience that starts to shift customers perceptions of the new brand.
Action:
Once the foundations of the brand experience are defined, workshop with product, technology, service and operational teams to develop and flex these principles, ensuring any channel specific challenges are considered. Ultimately it is these teams that create and deliver the experience, and engaging them in the process can be commercially smart and also personally rewarding.
4. A consistent team within all partner agencies
It's understandable that teams change and people move on. However, brands move so fast that the quality can suffer if the new team doesn't properly understand the ambition. Remember, people need more than to be shown the latest guidelines to 'get it'.
Action:
It's always a good idea to grab a coffee with the new team and speak openly and informally about targets for the brand, areas of weakness and what you need specifically from them. Everyone feels better when they know where they stand.
5. Digital doesn't end at .com
Once the new website has launched you have to consider the role your brand plays in the broader social conversation.
It's pretty well documented most brands aren't great at this. The all too familiar Twitter scenario plays out something like; customer needs help, brand doesn't answer but starts random # chat about something that happened two weeks ago, customer gets angry and tweets about rubbish company.
Action:
If you are going to enter the conversation, you must have a dedicated team readily available to engage with people. And as important as having the infrastructure in place – you need to have an opinion. If you're giving it the c-suite acceptable chat, you'll be found out very quickly and no one wants their Dad at the disco.
These are only five super top-line watch-outs to be aware of as you go into the post-launch phase and, as every brand is different, I'm certain there are hundreds more. If you would like to talk to us about some of the challenges you face, please get in touch, or you can critique this article in the comments section below ;)
Dan Greene is a design director at Wolff Olins London.