Impact finds its calling, says Sarah Benson

Posted on July 10, 2012 by wmhadmin

Impact can make the point more clearly

You know the ones: you start seeing them everywhere; on t-shirts, Tube posters and telly ads. Then, like last year’s X-factor winner, they fade into obscurity. I’m talking about typefaces, the dernier-cri fonts that gain a spike in popularity and adoption. The appropriately named Avant Garde was ubiquitous in design back in 2008, and this year it seems Gotham is enjoying a similar renaissance.

But what of less-favoured cousins such as Comic Sans, Papyrus and Impact, who have no jaunty ligatures or famous foundry heritage to boast?

These days, on many a University design course, students using Impact in their work is enough to make tutors bristle. Designed in the 60’s by Geoffrey Lee, (himself a former tutor at LCP), Impact was created to be an economical solution for British metal typesetters, when foreign imports were too expensive.

However, being sold as part of Microsoft’s core fonts package meant that Impact was, well, less impactful once PCs became so widely used. With its original purpose arguably dead, what’s next for Z-list Impact? Scrapheap?

Possibly not. With all good comebacks, there’s a change of purpose. Impact is now the go-to font for all good internet memes: easily recognizable, easily accessible and its downbeat reputation only adds to the effect. Whether a lolcat, Gene Wilder or ‘Conspiracy Keanu’; memes have offices all over the world sniggering and pressing the forward button.

It’s not just about an empty office-funny. Memes in their very nature are pieces of ‘interestingness’ picked up from popular culture, replicated and transported on a huge scale. From our 1920’s kitten below to today’s cheeseburger cats. In the case of the Impact memes, they’re now firmly placed in a sort of cultural history. If we were to make a 2012 time capsule of popular culture, it would almost certainly include a few crudely comps of funny photos and captions in Impact. And thus, Impact lives on.

Like Mike Tyson before it, it’s possible to come back with a whole new purpose and still be considered a success. Sure, Impact’s lanky X-heights don’t allow it into any contemporary designers’ repertoire; but so what. It has found its own niche: the everyman’s funny font. Proving that culture has a funny way of allowing things to rise up from the ashes.

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The not so humble placement, from Craig Kirk

Posted on June 27, 2012 by wmhadmin

Being a good placement. It's not only about tea making.

It’s graduate time again! Here at Williams Murray Hamm we love graduates and not in the Mrs. Robinson way. We have placements all year round, usually for between 2 – 4 weeks each, and we pay them.

For us it’s a great opportunity. The best young graduates can shake us up and inspire us with their enthusiasm and new ways of seeing and doing things. Indeed, most of the designers at WMH started out as placements and made themselves so invaluable that they became full timers, myself included.

We try to give our placements a good mix of jobs and experience. We put them on live jobs, from Stage1 concepts for a new logo, to rolling out a new brand across several platforms. There is also the obligatory tea making and board cutting. Before those recent graduates amongst you yawn, at WMH we value tea making almost as much as that scamp sheet filled with potential yellow pencil ideas on it. It says you’re willing to be part of a team, whether tea making or concept creating and willing to put time and effort into every part of your placement experience. We expect a lot from our placements, in terms of enthusiasm and work ethic.

Create difference.

So how do these graduate get in? With PDF portfolios coming in ten to the dozen how does a graduate stand out from the crowd? Don’t do what everybody else does. Good work, with good ideas is always going to rise to the top, but it doesn’t hurt to create something that’s really going to catch our attention.

We really lament the decline of post and placement mailers. With the rise of copy and paste emails fired off to the top 20 London agencies, it’s become a forgotten mode of communication. Why not whet the appetite of the agency you hope to work at? Over the years we’ve had lots of fun ideas; late night working survival kits, placement tea vouchers even back scratchers (you scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours). It’s all about having a good idea that gets us excited. From this a graduate will get through the door to show their folio, perhaps do a placement, and who knows, even get a job?

Placements are an integral part to the design industry, keeping established designers on their toes, producing new and exciting work and helping studios keep new blood in their agencies. Long live them!

If you want to see this year’s crop, then I recommend you going to D&AD New Blood exhibition at Old Spitalfields Market. You do need to register here.

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Heatherwick makes things wearing green trousers, says Guy Lambert

Posted on June 21, 2012 by wmhadmin

Heatherwick's Seed Cathedral for the Expo in Shanghai

I spent a muddy Jubilee Week at the Hay Festival. No, I don’t vote Liberal Democrat. Amongst a swathe of celebrity authors a big, unexpected highlight was Thomas Heatherwick talking about his career and new book, ‘Making’, with Mariella Frostrup.

Wearing a courageous pair of pistachio green trousers he wowed and swooned a rain-soaked audience of a thousand people, most of who were not from the design industry. I have to confess to being a little star-struck myself although bridled at waiting in the hour-long, mostly female, queue that formed for him to sign copies of his book.

He talked about his student years, The Seed Cathedral, B Of The Bang and the Routemaster Bus. For the last of these he received a spontaneous and rapturous round of applause from the audience.

It’s been over 20 years since Channel 4 did ‘Better By Design’ with Richard Seymour and Dick Powell. Given Heatherwick’s obvious crowd appeal, the fact that he’s a global British success story and that his studio occupies a genuinely fascinating space (somewhere between design, architecture, art and municipal wellbeing) perhaps its time for a new TV series to champion design to the British public fronted by him?

If you missed Heatherwick at Hay Festival, then go and see his Designing The Extraordinary exhibition at the V&A.

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WMH puts clear and optimistic design at the heart of the NuMe range from Morrisons

Posted on June 1, 2012 by wmhadmin

NuMe, a vibrant and optimistic brand that offers a healthier choice

Proud to say that the first products from ‘NuMe’, Morrisons’ innovative own brand health range, are now on shelf.

315 brand new lines will replace the Eat Smart range and offer new lines across chilled, frozen and ambient, promising great tasting products to help customers searching for healthier alternatives to their favourite meals and snacks. The full range will be in store by August.

Our innovative solution in designing the new brand, name and packaging for NuMe, matches the innovation that has been key to the development of the new range, with the Morrisons team of professional chefs and nutritionists concentrating on clear healthier benefits that don’t compromise on taste or, importantly, value, to make sure there is always a NuMe option that is affordable for everyone.

As well as the products themselves being revolutionised, we have developed a clear and simple brand new system of labelling that aims to demystify health cues and help shoppers navigate for healthier options more simply. A clear, simple iconography has been adapted to pack, that allows clear call out of everything from calorie control to five-a-day, explaining why each product is a healthier option.

WMH always strives for simplicity in packaging design, and this is reflected in the clear messaging, which is at once easy for customers to understand the benefits of the product.

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Convenience as currency, says Sarah Benson

Posted on May 11, 2012 by wmhadmin

Ikea reinventing convenience for the tv masses

There’s a certain contradiction between our hunger for the new and the next and the belt tightening that is facing most people. It’s a world where we’re reluctant to flash the cash yet still desperate to know what Apple might release next.

What’s happened is an interesting take on consumers applying ‘good enough’ principles. The most Malthusian of brand strategists predicted that consumers would toss their gold-plated-truffle-coated-limited edition products in the bin and buy basic: trading down. In actual fact, savvy consumers have been trading across.

Clever brands, knowing that consumers won’t sacrifice convenience; have been quick to tailor products to this new breed of consumer. Consider Zipcar, the pay-by-the-hour car rental. In major cities, owning a car simply doesn’t make financial sense for many people, but neither does giving up on the convenience of getting around. If you can’t afford to buy and service a car, so what? A monthly rental is ‘good enough’. Or high tech digital cameras: if your mobile now takes high enough quality snaps, it’s good enough.

In Autumn, IKEA will release another of its space-saving , bank friendly products that we’ve come to associate with the brand. But no beech or MDF in sight, for this time it’s a TV. The assumption is that consumers are more concerned with the convenience of the offering – and in this case, the lack of nuisance peripherals and cables – that buying that 3D, large format Sony just isn’t worth it.

It’s a similar story with the recent sellout of Marni’s collection for H&M, or the introduction of Netflix in the UK: consumers don’t need the £500 label or special edition DVD. If it’s available in a more convenient form, it’s good enough. Why sell your house with the bloke in the suit that’s offered you a ‘complimentary’ bottle of beer in exchange for a crippling fee? Sites such as Sarah Beeny’s Tepilo.com offer the same service, streamlined.

And the moral of the story? Keep your eyes open. Follow consumer behaviour patterns than rather than always competing with the Joneses. Rather than adding extra toppings, sometimes it’s the way you bake it that counts.

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Own Label 4.0 – a new way forward says Wybe Magermans

Posted on March 27, 2012 by wmhadmin

Chokablok - brand or own-label?

From the earliest generic own brand ranges, to German discount giants copying branded products shamelessly as price fighters and the radical launch of Tesco Finest, retailer own brands have run rings round traditional brands. Indeed, in the past decade supermarket brands with their three tier strategies literally encircle branded goods eating away at their power and appeal. Tesco Value and Finest are each £1 bn+ businesses in the UK.

Traditionally private label has been most successful in categories where consumers have no brand preference. Yet, with own-label’s progress on product, supermarkets treat their ranges as brands – something we helped Sainsbury’s with when we created the SO Organic range. The packaging design not only created a coherent range, but also introduced a new language in organic food. A grocer was leading the branded world.

In some European markets the own label world is seen differently. In Switzerland, Migros, the leading supermarket chain, stocks mainly their own ‘brands’, except for some carefully selected superbrands. These are perceived as signposts of their respective category, such as Heinz Ketchup, or Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

It is no surprise that Wal-Mart started asking brand-owners to pitch their products for their highly desired shelf space. What’s the difference between Utterly Butterly and I Can’t Believe It’s Butter – do we need both?

Now, to further complicate things, in come ‘venture brands’. For those who don’t read the Grocer (I know, Heaven forefend, there are those who don’t) Chokablok is a joint venture that Tesco launched last year. It started out as ice cream and is expected to be worth £3m this year. It has already launched an Easter egg and we are to expect chocolate bars later this year. ‘Made by an expert team of master cremeliers’ it’s a fully-fledged, cross-category ‘brand’ in Tesco’s aisles, which doesn’t carry the Tesco name and might just see the end of middling brands like Galaxy. There’s already a Facebook page.

People within the big brand owners that have claimed not be threatened by this are either ignorant or lying. After the generic, quasi brands and umbrella brands, it’s the fourth generation: Own-Label 4.0.

Future gazing: Why would Tesco stop here and not create a store full of venture brands? Of course the flagship brands will prevail, but the volume of many middle of the aisle brands is made up of needless extensions, which also work as a defence tactic in the shelf space war.

Switched-on brands already realise that to continue to justify their price premium and their shelf space they need to create a word where they are indispensible – where their products exceed expectations and their communications and packaging work as one. If customers are to be loyal, it can never be about price because someone will always undercut you. It needs to be about love.

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I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine, says Sarah Benson

Posted on March 1, 2012 by wmhadmin

Back To The Future

Reminiscing on the good old days is like crawling into a pair of pyjamas and eating some feel good food. In fact, the WMH studio recently shared a bonding moment by creating the playlist ‘the first single you ever bought’. In between the frothy memories of Elton John, Bananarama and, unfortunately, Peter Andre; there was a sudden sense of camaraderie.

So what is it about nostalgia that binds, socializes and gets the serotonin flowing? Isn’t it just a lazy technique that ultimately halts progress? After all, the word was derived from ‘homesickness’.

For the past few years since our gloomy economists threw more and more bad news our way, brands such as Monster Munch, John Lewis, M&S, Fairy, Milky Way and Persil have hopped aboard the retro express. Why? They are easy ways to Utopia; an edited look at the past where we intentionally omit any of the grit that might really have existed.

Wallpaper manufacturers are selling 1970s style patterns; fashion and film are going gaga over The Great Gatsby; Tupperware parties are back; and the Instagram app was the runaway success of 2011. It’s the brand and trend equivalent of battening down the hatches, and in many cases, it’s jolted the minds of consumers into repurchasing products and benefiting sales.

However to do it frivolously can leave your consumers with a sour taste. When Muller launched its ‘wonderful stuff’ ad late last year, some criticized its blatant throwing together of 80s cartoons for cheap thrills, ridiculing its consumers as passive telly gobblers. Whilst we firmly believe in breaking category convention, without a believable tangible backstory, brands risk seeming phony.

And let’s not forget, keeping both feet in the rosy past prevents us pioneering for the new, improved and the innovative. Brands that can acknowledge their heritage but continue to be hungry for a brave future are the ones that will surely prevail.

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Greed is a force from the dark side, says Wybe Magermans.

Posted on February 6, 2012 by wmhadmin

May the force be with you on every billboard

Greed is evil. The intense and selfish desire for wealth or power is of course one of our seven deadly sins. Since the banking crisis, greed is seen as the main reason for the demise of the world’s wellbeing. From Gordon Gekko to Lehman Brothers, greed is a virus that is resistant to any ‘powers of good’. Looking from where I sit, greed seems also to ruin one of the great brands from the world of film.

George Lucas invented something that at one point saved the film industry: licensing. He famously waived his fee as a director for Star Wars and agreed to own only the licensing rights. Rights that 20th Century Fox deemed worthless. These same rights have earned George Lucas a personal wealth of $3.2 billion according to Forbes magazine. Mr Lucas attached the Star Wars name to games, books, television series and collectables. It’s estimated that Star Wars fans have spent an approximate $40 billion on merchandise since 1977. Me including, as I cherish my Millennium Falcon and another 40 odd figurines, indeed, Han Solo’s spacecraft has pride of place in my living room. So why is it then that Mr Lucas decides that he needs more?

Now, I don’t want to sound like a naïve crusty who is against capitalism and all accumulation of wealth. I work in marketing for goodness sake! It is actually not George Lucas’ wealth I am concerned about, but how he is slowly killing the Star Wars brand through overexposure and ill-chosen partnerships. Although it has been almost 7 years since the last Star Wars film was released, the brand is still very much around us. Feel the force of a mobile internet plan or join the rebellion in an electrical retailer. No doubt the Star Wars endorsement is lucrative for brands like VW, Currys and Vodafone, who recently all have used Mr Lucas’ creations in their campaigns. Yet I wonder if all these partnerships are right for the Star Wars brand? The deal with for instance LEGO is a great fit since both brands share a sense of imagination or creativity, but how do the values of Vodafone match with Star Wars? Seeing too much of a good thing can make it turn into a bad thing.

The power of Star Wars should enable George Lucas to choose his licensing deals more carefully. He needs to not only build their brands, but also his own. As recently demonstrated, a marriage can go sour. VW The Dark Side was a campaign for Greenpeace. It is a well-executed spoof on VW’s ad where a little boy is testing his powers as Darth Vader on a VW Passat. It highlights VW’s opposition to cuts on CO2 emissions. No doubt harming VW more than Lucasfilm, it can’t have been a positive contributor to the brand either.

Jamie Oliver also famously suffered from overexposure about 10 years ago. Books, TV series, mugs, calendars – his chubby face was everywhere. He reinvented himself by finding a purpose. His mission of ‘good food education’ connected with people and set him apart from the other celebrity chefs. Jamie himself would probably admit that he is not the world’s best chef. Yet his love for food can change the way people eat in schools and homes. Since 2002 his raison d’etre has been at the centre of what he does and gives the Jamie brand a magnetic north. In which direction is Star Wars’ compass pointing?

As any future films in the Star Wars franchise seem very unlikely, George Lucas needs to rethink his long-term strategy for Star Wars. Too many licencing deals will lower the exclusivity of the brand and will surely limit the premium he can command. Mr Lucas, remember: absence does make the heart grow fonder.

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They’ve got the Knowhow

Posted on January 18, 2012 by wmhadmin

KNOWHOW at your fingertips

We’ve been telling anyone who will listen about the success of the Knowhow brand that we created with our good friends Branded, who share our offices and with whom we often work. The trouble is, we’ve never been able to quantify this, beyond saying that ‘it’s doing very well’.

Well, now it’s all over the business press. Dixon’s Retail Group (that’s Curry’s, PC World et al) has announced a good performance in difficult trading conditions. It’s seen off the threat of BestBuy, the sale of Comet for £1 and, to an extent, the challenge of the internet. Shares rose 10% this morning on the news and there, in black and white, is the story that Knowhow has made a major contribution to its success. Bloomberg article.

To add to the positive news, Knowhow has also made some waves in customer service circles. We couldn’t be happier for them.

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Be personal, just don’t tell me you are, demands Wybe Magermans

Posted on September 22, 2011 by wmhadmin

Your national local store done well

Myspace
Youtube
Mymuesli
YourM&S

It’s been a marketing trend for some years. Brands have had an unstoppable urge to get personal or ensure they have a special place in our lives. Now Costcutter is launching another unimaginative version of this intimate marketing strategy.

‘MyCostcutter’ is their attempt to create a premium expression of a convenience store. It has the usual premium codes of black and a hint of colour, while the simple addition of ‘My’ in the name tries to convince me that Costcutter has become part of my local community. Either the Costcutter marketing department is naïve or it suffers from delusions of grandeur, to think that this name change makes it part of the local fabric.

Budgens does this locality message so much better. Their local, independently owned stores, bear the name of their original owners e.g. Jay’s Budgens at Brockley Road. Combining the authority of a recognised chain with the familiarity of a local shop owner.

Jamie Oliver’s Recipease stores work directly with local schools, providing cooking lessons. Their simple “Make Food Not War” message painted on their smashed window morning after the Clapham riots gave a brilliant personal voice to the store.

Across the Channel some discounters have become accepted and trusted retailers. This is helped by a North European sense of Calvinism, where being frugal is seen as a virtue. In the UK, discount stores still serve the bottom end of the market, but surely being clever with money also has its value on this island. There is a big job to be done in UK retailing, by ‘premiumising’ (to use an overused marketing word) discount stores, but trying to be ‘my friend’ might not be the way.

Come on Poundland, Aldi and Lidl, show that Costcutter is missing the point.

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