News & Views

If you’re reading this, you’re likely to be leading your business from the front. You may be pioneering a vibrant new start-up, or you could be running an established player in a combative market. Whichever it is, you’re looking to grow value – and know that you’ll need to be bold with your brand.

• Maybe you’re working out how to integrate a set of existing, but disparate brands so they’re easier to manage as a whole.
• Or you want to package the brands you’ve created or acquired, so people understand them better.
• You might even be planning to build a brand house from scratch, with one powerful source driving multiple propositions as you grow.

We’ve been there, with front-line experience, helping strategies emerge, making them work in reality, winning over audiences – all to support our clients’ ambitions. We work in four distinct business sectors where output or products are often intangible, but where the value the personal experience of a brand matters above all else:

• Entertainment and Media
• Professional Services
• Technology & Data
• Purpose Driven Organisations

Here are four examples where our careful alignment of brand positioning and identities have enabled our clients to manage multiple offers, right across their often very broad audience profiles.

Bauer Media

Seeing radio, making noise, breaking records

Bauer briefed us to create positioning and cut-through ad campaigns for their radio brands, attract more listeners, advertisers and top-name presenters – and drive understanding of the brand inside Bauer.

Differentiated brand identities, messaging and campaigns for Bauer’s portfolio of national radio brands.

We’ve worked with Bauer across a range of radio brand assets, from giving Absolute Radio it’s ‘Real Music Matters’ positioning line – which immediately clarified what the station and it’s listeners stand for – to achieving an ambitious consolidation of scattered local radio brands into one, new, national Hits Radio brand network. We’ve created powerful new branding and messaging for Magic Radio which has helped reposition the station for a whole new generation of listeners, while holding onto their current audience. And our campaign work for Greatest Hits Radio has helped attract high-profile presenters who’ve quickly felt at home, as well as achieving record figures – including 1M new listeners in just one quarter – and outperformed forecasts from outset.

The overriding result has been to create common touchpoints for a wide range of Bauer’s radio brands, making them easier to manage and maintain by Bauer’s in-house marketing teams, while retaining the carefully constructed character of each.

We’ve also helped MTV Europe, Channel 4 Television, Celador, Turner Television, Universal and Virgin Group by differentiating brands within their groups.

AEG/TheO2

Changing negative perceptions of a venue with positive rebranding.

The O2 needed a big bold new brand to house a diverse range offers in a single building with a footprint the size of Soho. Help the owner, Anschutz Entertainment Group, lobby local and central government, attract promoters, supporters and a name sponsor. Then go on to promote the place itself and the entertainment, sports, exhibition and hospitality brands within it.

The world’s biggest umbrella brand and all-in-one destination

The new brand marque for The O2 focused on the scale of the venue – and put the sponsor right up front. Positioning the destination as ‘A world of entertainment under one roof’ clarified the purpose of redevelopment. The media dropped “previously known as The Millenium Dome” in coverage, almost immediately. Sponsors, hospitality buyers, retailers and promoters came on board ahead of expectations and The O2 was voted the world’s best entertainment venue a year after opening.

We’ve also helped people engage with brand houses like Mahindra Group, Hard Rock International, Multiplex Global, Renewal / New Bermondsey, the Roundhouse and even The Rolling Stones.

NEX Group

Consolidating a house of varied assets and brands, acquired over years of investment

We created a single, coherent brand offer to the financial markets that maximised the value of multiple financial brokerage entities and launched it as a global, digital powerhouse.

A scalable brand structure and messaging, inside one brand identity, for a market-leading money broker

We delivered brand strategy, positioning, naming, visual identity and a high visibility launch – in just one year. NEX was able to unify its teams, excite markets and fuel incredible, rapid growth. The brand architecture became the model for reorganising the business. Within two years the company sold to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) for £3.9BN.

We’ve also helped Banking Circle Group, Simplify Group, Yo!, Pepper Advantage and Squircle Capital consolidate their brands into a singular offer.

Kantar

A name change for a portfolio of companies had failed to articulate meaningful difference to Kantar’s overall proposition, their own colleagues’ lives or their clients’ businesses.

Kantar needed to bring together teams of people under one big, unifying brand promise and then articulate, coordinate and implement messaging for individual business lines.

Uniting a diverse Market Research firm by giving it purpose.

Our discovery phase identified a common high-level purpose across the organisation. This informed a new brand essence which inspired people internally and engaged audiences externally. The positioning now speaks a brand truth for the entire firm, however a clients’ needs are tackled. Kantar’s commitment to inclusivity and diversity showed strongly in the launch campaign, while business areas were given specific messaging to contextualise and extend the central idea.

We’ve also given voice and purpose to group brands like ACI Worldwide, Practical Law, Lexis Nexis, Times Newspapers, and McLean Advisory.

If you want to discuss the best way to take your brand portfolio to market, take a look at how we help brands grow or just get in touch.