It’s been another big week here at UnderscoreHQ, but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about what’s shakin’ in the creative world news.
In the land of typefaces we checked out a new font from Rory Harnden who has stepped up his typeface game with the ever so fun NOSY ‘face-type’.
Using standard OpenType Ligatures, NOSY allows you to create a face purely from type, and it turns out that some of us have an interesting perspective on what we actually look like. See if you can spot which face we’re talking about by checking out our results video!
Underscore takes on NOSY from Underscore Design on Vimeo.
Create your own here and tweet us the result! As well as being a great live demo, the actual typeface can be downloaded for free, or with a donation.
(Ps. We found that the demo works best in Chrome).
How London Venues can unlock competitive advantage.
According to results published from a major international study by MasterCard, London is forecast to receive a Globally dominant 18.7 million visits this year, which equates to an 8 per cent surge in tourism in 2014.
The findings indicate that London has maintained and even built on its post Olympic allure, but what does this mean for the capital’s venues and how do they manage to be heard above the noise?
Firstly in so many cases it’s not about the aesthetics or even the location. It’s about the visitor experience. Creating it, branding it and selling it.
It’s no secret that the branding and marketing of an experience is a complex art. Dubbed as “marketing the invisible”, a customer cannot touch or feel a service like they can a product, and the service experience itself can vary depending on a myriad of factors, including staff competence, weather and even the mood of the customer. Services also cannot be ‘stored’ other than as memories, so it’s important to make these exceptional.
The London venue and live entertainment industry has a global reputation of excellence. Unsurprisingly the market is saturated; there are now approximately 25,000 venue and entertainment businesses in London, although VisitBritain has predicted a 4.2% growth in value for inbound tourism this year, so the opportunity for venues to capitalise on this healthy growth is immense.
In our experience at Underscore what most venues are lacking is that special “spark”. This isn’t achieved by promotional activity or through experiential marketing strategies. It is achieved by developing an emotional connection with your target audience that is used to nurture and develop a relationship for the long term. Here are a few key considerations to help location brands to better connect with audiences.
Know your audience
It can be easy to get caught up in “the way things are done around here” and forget to prioritise the very people you are trying to attract, your customers. Think first about the demographics and behaviours of your target audience. Where do they come from and how do they travel? What are their spending patterns? Where do they work? What else do they do in their free time? How much time do they have available for leisure? What level of education do they have? What gets them out of bed in the morning? What does happiness look like to them? Every piece of information you gather will help you understand who you are marketing to and most importantly what they want to hear. Never assume. It’s always better to ask.
Many people attend cultural venues because of a hedonistic drive to seek experiences that bring them enjoyment. Knowing this is one thing, but if you do not know what enjoyment looks like for your customers, you cannot communicate with them clearly. Preferences on venues, attendance motivations and arts and culture differ significantly just by age group and gender alone. Throw in some special interest groups, cultural preferences and competitors’ offerings and things get more complicated. Make the effort to really get to know your customers. Survey them and test your assumptions and concepts on them. Check if your story resonates with them. Does it truly create an emotional connection?
Know your front line
Remarkable insights can be gleaned by asking the opinions of people who live and breathe the brand every day; the employees themselves. When Alexandra Palace commissioned Underscore to revisit their positioning we facilitated sessions, which challenged their teams to find a way to connect the original vision of the Palace to their own experience. The result was “Alexandra Palace – the people’s palace”, which ensured their staff felt like custodians of the brand and this was then supported by a customer call to action of “Discover your Ally Pally”. This defined the venue as a familiar and welcoming destination for discoveries of the young, the old and everyone in between. There is always a reason why your brand is special, you might just need help articulating it, so why not start at the front line to see your own people become living, breathing brand ambassadors.
Develop your distinct difference
For venues in particular, making marketing visible and memorable can be difficult. There is consistent pressure to reconnect with old audiences, expand reach, attract a completely new audience and achieve record visitor numbers. But simple is always best.
Once you’ve got to know your people, clarify your own objectives; the best experiences are authentic experiences so be honest about who you are and what you stand for. Over promising and under delivering is hugely detrimental to your brand as you cannot be everything to everyone. But you can be something special to enough audiences by offering an experience that’s true to your brand and therefore memorable for all the right reasons.
Carve out your niche by taking the time to identify what makes your brand special and different, and cement it. Bounce ideas off existing customers or other stakeholders to challenge yourself even further, and you will be surprised what you can uncover.
Plan ahead, and collaborate to execute effectively
Whether you’re a destination venue or an Estate landlord it’s important to remember that first impressions last.
You can ensure a great start by ensuring that your welcome messages are clear and on brand, and that the visitor experience is uniform and universal wherever possible. To achieve this you may wish to consider teaming up with surrounding businesses to offer more choice and to strengthen the offer of the wider area as a destination in itself.
The right combination of commercial and leisure offerings supported by themed events creates a series of short stories that contribute to the overall brand experience, and The Cadogan Estate is a great example of this approach.
Amidst a full calendar of events for which Underscore has provided brand support, “Chelsea in Bloom” has become an annual event that offers the landlord and the retailer a chance to collaborate. As a result 26% more visitors this year took their chance to explore a world of exclusivity, excitement and spontaneity during the RHS Flower Show week.
So in many ways unlocking your brand story is a complex process. It’s a collaboratively driven period of getting to know your customers and your employees, and then making some concrete decisions about yourself. But in doing this, even in the ‘crowded’ London market, any location can unlock their competitive advantage and make a lasting connection.
Brought to you by underscore thought leaders:
Neil Stanhope, Managing Director &
Rachael Bradley, Strategic Account Executive.
The champion of small businesses, Alex Polizzi, returned to BBC Two last night in her new series of The Fixer, featuring Underscore in her plan to save the struggling Hunters Brewery.
With a vision to keep Paul & Eline Walker’s dream alive, Alex Polizzi tasked the re-branding strategy of Hunters Brewery to Underscore to position their British real ale for an international market.
Hunters Brewery started six years ago when Paul Walker dreamt of running his very own micro-brewery in the heart of Devon, however it had slowly turned into a struggle as the business was losing direction.
The episode aired with a whirlwind glimpse into the work-shopping process at Underscore’s Thinking Garden, capturing the thoughts of Alex, Paul & Eline, together with some of our leading strategists, in a collaborative effort to give the business renewed purpose.
As the branding agency of West Berkshire Brewery and Beavertown Brewery, Underscore was selected for the project when Alex identified that the micro-brewery needed a broader market appeal, and a creative branding agency with brewery experience to achieve it.
We were asked to refresh the logo and evolve the look of three beer pumps, with a vision to position the brand for an international market. With this in mind we planned out what the brand was currently saying in it’s deer head logo, and what options could be explored to enhance the value of their connection to differing audiences. What we produced was a number of solutions that retained the element of ‘Hunting’, whilst being respectful to the delicacy of the subject itself.
The selected logo concept featured a modern representation of a deer leaping over the brewery name, creating a strong visual relationship and a distinctive identity. From here we refreshed three bottle labels, and created a consistent look and feel across the board to bring them together as a family. We used soft natural earthy tones, representative of the countryside, and the typography was bold and distinctive, which interacted visually with their bespoke illustrations.
The result was a brand that not only established an emotional connection to an international audience, but an emotional connection for Paul & Eline to their brand which they had poured their heart and soul into for so long. It was exactly what every brand needed – a connection externally to those who purchase, and a connection internally to those who create and supply it.
The Hunters Brewery will be launching their new labels once their existing stock runs out, so more exciting developments are on the horizon for all who appreciate quality real ale and branding.
From thought leaders to small screen stars, Underscore is thinking big and making waves.
See the full case study here.
Missed it? Tune in here.
Last week, Instagram stepped up its social game with the introduction of Hyperlapse – a new app aimed at giving users the freedom to capture and share moving time-lapse videos.
Unlike the traditional use of time-lapse technology where the video requires your phone or camera to be held still, Hyperlapses offer a special kind of time-lapse captured with movement of the user.
Instagram has described Hyperlapse as having “…built-in stabilization technology that lets you create moving, handheld time-lapses…in a cinematic look, quality and feel — a feat that has previously only been possible with expensive equipment.”
Being an agency that’s immersed in the creative industry, we thought we’d check it out! We found that the app gives promising results with its easy-to-use functionality allowing the user to film and share their video production almost immediately across multiple social channels. Trying a few videos around the office we ventured down to Oxford Circus to create our own Hyperlapse with varying results.
We feel that the app will further strengthen the popularity of video content being used in social media, particularly when it comes to engaging audiences in social media campaigns.
Oxford Circus Hyperlapse from Underscore Design on Vimeo. To find out more behind the technology in Hyperlapse please visit Instagram blog