Leicester Business Festival
Newenglish Design were proud to give a half day seminar for the Leicester Business Festival (24 October–4 November 2016) which featured 80 events over two weeks, 25 of which were sold out including our seminar on brand and web design.
The seminar took place at our studio in Leicester and was attended by both small and large businesses.
Brand
The first part of the seminar was about brand. First impressions count, and emotional connections create effective bonds. Wendy, Creative Director, gave thoughtful insight about how businesses can connect deeply with their customers through honest branding:
It’s about clearly and consistently applying your values to everything that you do.
Ask yourself the question, how do we as consumers engage with a brand on an emotional level? When a strategically defined brand gets it right, what happens is like when people fall in love with each other. This is the same for all businesses, big and small.
This leads to:
- Loyalty
- Advocacy and
- Can protect your price in times when competitors rely on promotional discounts to drive sales.
- The ideal platform from which to extend your offer or range
A great example of a brand that invokes a moral ethos and shared value is Macmillan cancer support. The obvious shared value is that cancer sufferers deserve compassionate care. Wendy went on to unpack the Macmillan brand values which are all embodied in the simple advertising below.
Our own big brand example is Honda. Newenglish has been one of their major creative agencies for 19 years to date. Reflecting the brand personality through design, digital and advertising in a perpetually competitive market place. This is how Honda describes itself, below, followed by one of our advertising campaigns:
Our small brand example is brü, a brand for which we were tasked to bring big brand success into something which looks and feels independent, but that is replicable in roll out to other cities. We came up with the name and a brand which looks professional, local, warm and individual.
The success of the Cafe speaks for itself, as after just over a year, the brand rolled out a second store in London:
Take home messages:
- Identify your core values
- Promote a consistent image & message
- Involve your staff
- Remember everything you do is linked to your brand.
Web Design
The second part of the seminar focused on web design and how useful, well designed websites can bring amazing results.
Clients often need a little help thinking through some basic questions, and these can sometimes be overlooked even by experienced marketers.
Carl, Creative Director, asked 2 simple questions:
1. Why do you need a website?
2. What do you want it to do?
A demonstrable example of a website that enabled the business to save tens of thousands on recruitment costs was a website we did for Building Services Design (BSD).
This is a working example of good web design, with simple navigation that subsequently resulted in reduced overhead and ultimately a happy client.
Take home messages:
- Think about mobile strategy
Look at your google analytics and see what percentage of visitors view your site on mobile/tablet as well as desktop - Gain inspiration
Look at your competitors and non-competitors and see why you like them. Communicate with your web design to ensure that you and your organisation stands out from the crowd - Content
Make sure you know what you want on your site and make your images personal to you and your organisation - Strong call to action
What’s in it for a visitor to your site, what will they gain? - Trust
Believe that the web designer know what they are doing, let them do what they do best, making it more likely to meet or exceed your expectations.
Feedback from the seminar
Thank you for the seminar and the warm welcome today. I enjoyed the seminar and found it informative. It was clear, concise and easy to follow. The statistics for the sites you had designed were amazing. The networking was an added bonus and your coffee is quality! Thank you once again.
Thank you so much for your time yesterday. You covered so much in two hours, it was fantastic and really got me thinking.
