Keeping ideas fizzing for The Coca-Cola Company

We have been rostered with The Coca-Cola Company for nearly 15 years and it is where we discovered our passion for stories. Our biggest ever story emerged from a project for Minute Maid orange juice where our positioning evolved into the Open Happiness platform for the core brand.

Since then we have worked on dozens of projects creating fast track opportunities for new drinks and research concepts and promoting new category opportunities in hot beverages. We helped rationalise the creative platforms for The Coca-Cola Company’s 147 global water brands and helped to shape the functional drinks strategy for the whole European Market. We are now helping name, package and develop Emerging Brands concepts for research and development.

Our project for Sarson’s vinegar is a perfect example of how digging into a brand’s past can reveal some hidden gems for its future facing stories.

A visit to the factory in Middleton in Manchester became an inspiration. Sarson’s revealed a world of wooden vats and provenance of ingredients that would be the envy of most craft beers. Sarson’s goes through a craft brewing process every bit as complex as the finest beers. In fact they brew a hop-free ale before it’s ‘acetified‘ in Siberian pine vats some of which are over 150 years old.

We felt Sarson’s could reclaim its rightful place as a craft brewed product and re-establish itself as a premium British brand in the minds of consumers. During the course of our Story Digging we discovered a page from a chemist’s notebook that led to the creation of a stronger roasted malt product that had excited customers in research and perfectly supported the repositioning of Sarson’s craftsmanship. Since then we have worked on NPD to extend the Sarson’s range of authentic British Vinegars and undertaken design for the launch of sauces for the Branston Pickle Brand.

Hovis is a classic British brand with a rich history, but what was its relevance to a modern consumer beyond misty-eyed nostalgia?

This was one of the first projects where we used our story modelling to unpick history and tell a new story that today’s consumers could relate to and that could drive the brand’s evolution.

Richard Stoney Smith was a health pioneer who believed in the goodness of wheatgerm. He struggled for years to find a way to stabilise the germ and mix it back into the bread. Wheat germ contains the concentrated nutrients that generate the wheat plant’s growth. As such it becomes a magical ingredient that taps into a much bigger concept of life and growth.

Forestry England – formerly the Forestry Commission - was commemorating 100 years in forestry in 2019. We were brought in to consolidate their brand story to mark this important anniversary and to promote greater understanding of the brand as it went forward. We acknowledged that the role of the commission had evolved over the years. What needed highlighting was the part it played in developing the countryside for recreation and in influencing the aesthetics of the landscape.

‘Shaping landscapes for the nation’ was chosen to highlight the importance, scale and long-term goals of Forestry England’s role. Being ‘landscapers’ was a concept people could readily understand. Tackling that complex job on a national scale, and influencing how our countryside and cities will look, feel and be used in the future can change our perception of Forestry.

Hormel Foods Corp. is one of the world’s largest food companies with a revenue of $9 billion and over 20,000 employees in 75 countries.

We have worked with Hormel in the US and UK on the global iconic SPAM® brand, contributed to global brand workshops for Skippy® and Muscle Milk®, launched STAGG® Chili in the UK and have been involved in market modelling and NPD for a range of projects in Europe, the US and Asia.

Our relationship with the legendary chopped pork and ham has continued for nearly 20 years. Over that time we have made the SPAM® brand ‘Hammier than Ham’, showed its versatility in a ‘SPAM® Can’ campaign and worked with the creators of SPAMalot™. Each positioning has been taken through from TV to press to online and social media with a national UK tour to bring SPAM® face-to-face with its fanatical audience.

The SPAM® brand is a marketing legend with over 150,000 Facebook fans. We react to rapidly changing tastes and trends while rising to the challenge of making an age old classic relevant to modern audiences. In the words of our first TV commercial... SPAM UP™!

For the creation of the Wales Coast Path brand we were briefed to come up with something unique, memorable and easy to follow. We needed a symbol that evoked all the myths and stories associated with Wales’s legendary coastline. The dragon shell developed into a legend all by itself and the greatest honour has been to see it immortalised in both signage and stone.

The merger of Scanmar and MarketingQED was where a force in data integration met a pioneer of data modelling.

Our story was inspired by the fact that while companies all talked a big data story, few were confident about it. We likened the big data revolution to the first era of space exploration, which was also a golden era for marketing.

We wanted to tap into the excitement and optimism of that period and usher in a new era of ‘corporate exploration‘. ScanmarQED products gave marketing departments the confidence to use data modelling to explore and be more experimental.

Marketers could ‘dare to do more with their data’ and support a new era of creativity backed by data.

Red Tractor is the independent farm and food assurance scheme driving world leading standards for British food.

78,000 British farms operate to Red Tractor Standards and the logo is found on £14 billion worth of British food. We ran workshops and the research to establish the positioning for the brand and were also responsible for supporting the launch of their animated national TV campaign.

Summoning a sense of place and identity is always a challenge. For Swansea, we were briefed to create a brand that could be the core message for tourism, education and inward investment.

Our research told us that only 26% of people could identify Swansea on a map and over 30% didn’t even know it was on the coast. Swansea also suffered from perceptions that it was “old-fashioned, industrial and built up”.

Yet Swansea is set in a bay with over 30 miles of coastline, 50 beaches and 4 nature reserves. We developed a brand positioning that played on its geographical positioning, and on a physical truth we had already experienced for ourselves on a bright blustery day. There was a rare quality to the air that comes from its coastal peninsula setting. We saw Swansea as ‘a breath of fresh living’ with a sense of space, and a healthier, more balanced environment for living, learning and leisure. The feeling of invigoration translated to all our target markets in our eventual strapline of ‘It’s a Bay of Life’.

If you come with an idea, or a blank sheet of paper, we are happy to help nurture your idea and take it from naming and brand identity through to the creation of marketing collateral.