Storm re-design Traidcraft speciality teas.
Traidcraft pioneered the UK’s first fairly traded tea in the early 1980s. Now, 30 years on, the company not only sells 27 million tea bags a year but is still playing an active role in the fight against poverty in the tea industry. All Traidcraft teas are Fairtrade the only system that guarantees tea producers a minimum price for their tea and pays an extra premium for farmers and workers to invest in their communities.
We are proud to have been working with Traidcraft since 2009, successfully re-launching their everyday teas and developing their premium African gold tea. The next step was to develop the Speciality Tea Range in order to stem declining sales and generate renewed interest, also to position it as a more premium offering.
It is vitally important that Traidcraft packaging not only reinforces their values but also captures both consumers driven by conscience and those driven by a desire for taste and quality. The new packs feature actual growers and their stories communicating the provenance of the core values of the brand. They also convey the origins, high quality and great taste of these carefully developed tea blends.
Kettle’s on…
Traditionally the process of branding consisted of burning a mark of ownership into the skin of livestock/slaves. The word has come a long way in terms of its meaning and the modern definition of ‘a brand’ is much more involved on many levels.
The Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is questioning the whole idea of branding to explore the question of art as commerce. His controversial ‘Art Farm’ rears pigs specifically as art objects, tattooing their skin with representations of modern brands and culture. He explores the two meanings of ‘brand’ forcing us to confront the fact that the animal is purely a commodity and that its skin is often used in luxury accessories.
He also examines the portrayal of animals in popular culture and how this is far removed form the realities of the modern farm. This raises questions of how as humans we on one hand personify animals and on the other treat them literally as ‘pieces of meat’.
Witness the making of a classic iconic love brand!
(And a not so subtle clue to the February Storm Brand Mash-up!)
Guess the brands to win a love-ly prize!
In anticipation of the 14th this months mash-up has a Valentines theme! Can you workout the three brands that make up this Storm logo? E-mail your answers to mashup@stormbranddesign.co.uk. Correct answers will be entered into a draw and the winner will get a love-ly prize! Good Luck!
Last months brands were Dole, Cape and Del Monte. Big congratulations to Elle Symonds, Assistant Brand Manager at Halfords. A £20 itunes voucher is on its way to you.
It’s all in the mind…
In Ben Goldacres book Bad Science, he talks about branded pain killers: “Brand-name painkillers might be better than blank box pain killers over here, but if you went and found someone with toothache in 6000bc, or up the Amazon in 1880, or dropped in on Soviet Russia in the 1970s, where nobody had seen the TV advert with the attractive woman wincing from a pulsing red orb of pain in her forehead, who swallows the painkiller, and then the smooth reassuring blue suffuses her body … In a world without those cultural preconditions to set up the dominoes, you would expect asprin to do the same job no matter what box it came out of.”
The reality is, as far as I understand it, that any drug goes through a rigorous, lengthy (and very expensive) phase of clinical trials and is ultimately approved for use for a specific condition. When the patent expires and a generic drug company comes along, they need to demonstrate that their version of the drug has exactly the same active ingredient and that it acts in the same way as the original product . This is evaluated by regulatory bodies and is approved based on it meeting these, and other, criteria. In short, the generic drug is compared to the branded drug and needs to behave in exactly the same way to be approved. There may be differences in the colour, shape, size or coating of the capsule or tablet, but when absorbed it should be indistinguishable.
However there is scientific evidence to show that a branded product is better! Research undertaken in 1981 by Branthwaite and Cooper showed that branded tablets were overall significantly more effective than unbranded tablets in relieving headaches. They hypothesised that these effects are due to increased confidence in obtaining relief with a well-known brand, and that branding has an analgesic effect that interacts with the analgesic effects of placebos and active ingredients.
Goldacre continues: “People I know still insist on buying brand-name painkillers. As you can imagine, I’ve spent half my life trying to explain to them why this is a waste of money: but in fact the paradox of Branthwaite and Cooper’s experimental data is that they were right all along. Whatever pharmacology theory tells you, that brand-name version is better, and there’s just no way of getting away from it…”
This encapsulates the strength of branding and also what I find so fascinating about my job: Capturing (or creating!) a reason to believe, finding an engaging and arresting way to communicate it. In short, making one product more preferable to another.
Done well, it can convince people that one thing is better than something that is essentially the same, or in many cases worse. It highlights the importance and potential financial gain in investing in good design. If a product is badly designed and looks unconvincing or generic it will not be able to convince your consumer that it is better than the rest…
I had loads of fun ripping up magazines and creating pictures with my five year old at the weekend. However our masterpieces didn’t come close to these fantastic collages by Derek Gores an artist based in Melbourne Florida. Gores says: “I like my pictures to barely come together with teasing little details. Sort of like how the mind can’t help but wander, even when trying to focus on one thing. In the collages, some of the little bits I use are deliberate, but in most I’m trusting randomness to help build an end result more interesting than I could have planned. One friend calls it a ‘Zen Narrative.’
I had more of a Ben 10 narrative!
The great film maker Frederico Fellini once said, “even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”
Our obsession with ‘self’ has come to dominate our everyday lives. And not just that, our obsession extends to our belief that other people are equally obsessed with us and vice versa. It’s undoubtedly the new trend. It crosses all divides of class, creed and colour. It manifests itself in our expanding egos. ie. ‘I am a celebrity’.
In fact you only have to look at the most popular TV shows in the world, -’I used to be a celebrity, get me back in there’. Or ‘X-Factor’, The X-factor panders to the millions of disillusioned hopefuls who think they can sing, shocked and devastated when told they have no talent whatsoever. Their dreams of a ‘quick fix to fame’, karaokeing their way up the charts, utterly shattered. In 1998 ‘Come dancing’ went off the air on BBC2 but of course the producers made the same fatal mistake, -it didn’t involve celebrities! The original format was created for real dancers (people who had the effrontery to spend years honing their profession, sweating and working hard at their craft) but their was no audience for that, but bung in a celebrity and you’ve got a major TV hit.
‘Celebrity’ comes from the Latin word celebritas’ which literally means ‘a multitude’, ‘a crowd’, and the word itself stems from the verb ‘celebro’ – ‘to go to a place often’. So we are all celebrities if our voice is heard amongst the multitude, the crowd, and we measure our celebrity by how many friends we have.
So where is this hallowed place we all visit so often in our multitudes to measure our egos, sorry friends? Exactly. Facebook.
Facebook is about to be floated on the stock market for $100 billion dollars. Its ever so slightly popular with nearly a billion people or in other words, everyone with access to a computer. It now has the same popularity as TV or mobile phones or cars or eating, even picking your nose. Why is it so popular? Well its simple. It’s genius. Its all about me, me, me, I, I, I. It’s a perfect example of Freud’s Id-Super ego dilemma;- ‘Want me, I want you, love me, I’ll love you’.
Before Facebook, popularity, celebrity status, ego etc. was gauged by carving your name for all to see in a school desktop. Now your name is up there on eight hundred million desktops. How many friends have you got? Your name in lights, you face, your shopping list at Tesco, the description of your new bag or hair do*. Don’t worry you are special, you are different, you are a celebrity.
* Information taken from the facebook top personal topics statistics)
Bruce found these sculptures by Mark Castator. Mark’s most recent collection features the moons of jupiter series which are stunning spherical compositions in polished steel, each piece “expresses the nature of mark’s contemporary and urban style”.
Guess the brands to win a fruity prize!
Happy New Year! After all the excesses of Christmas this months Storm Brand Mash-up has a fruity theme! Can you workout the three brands that make up this Storm logo? E-mail your answers to mashup@stormbranddesign.co.uk. Correct answers will be entered into a draw and the winner will get a fruity prize! Good Luck!
Focused research, development of a relevant brand positioning and creation of a strong identity resulted in GR8 sales for this range of bike accessories for Halfords. The range has more than doubled their sales forecasts!
