“We have to start at the beginning I guess, the original undertaking which was branding Mk.1 whereupon you captured our entire essence and reasoning for being SLS at that stage in our company growth and returned a neat pallet and architecture for us to use across all mediums. I have never studied branding or the reasoning behind what you do but the strongest message it returned was not about the visual which we could have all too easily got entrenched in, instead it refreshed and renewed our mission statement so that the message was unified and clear for our customers to see and understand but equally to give clarity to our internal motivation. As directors is perfectly paraphrased our ethos and enabled us to focus on our messaging and standards of operation.
At this stage our outbound marketing yielded great results and a certain improvement as we had a steady flow of inbound enquiries but we were a little (more) naïve back then and were not tracking our results and had no interaction with social media platforms, not as a result of your activity but purely down to our measured ignorance, we believed we wouldn’t have benefitted much, arguably still sceptical about fast moving sound bite media, Bookface, Twatter, Instacrap, etc.
As you well understand we have just undergone a secondary rebranding but this time with a wider focus on our output. As with the initial strategy you approached this redesign with a greater emphasis on what our business is and is destined to become rather than simply talking about the pallet and artistry you would apply. Basically you have proven to me repeatedly that your mode and method revolves around my business and how you understand my vision is how you deliver your solution and it has been bang on point now for years, even though our business is not the same. I suspect a lazy agency would look at the visual and in tackling the second stage of our branded identity would have probably returned a selection of mood boards and illustrations that would have been undeniably attractive but without purpose and/or explanation to aid our understanding and future design choice. That method would have stoked our ego’s but given we are not supposed to be branding experts we would have been left to our own devices which could have easily resulted in the wrong choice whereas your approach feels inclusive and purposeful and best still democratic. If I were to slate an idea you have offered revisions to reflect a blend of your expertise and our limitations to feed back a suitable solution that doesn’t just pander to our ego’s but sticks to your consistent approach of collaborative and authoritative branding.
We have repeatedly been complimented for our branding and the short movie for Connect is sensational. The messaging we have posted via social threads which is branded by you and your team has created considerable reaction and our social interactions have increased in huge multiples. We are the early stages of deployment and thus far the story is great.”
Peter Hoskin, Director SLS