I thought this photo was a good metaphor for the above question- and neatly leads to another one too- Can you afford not to invest in your brand?

I asked my son George to take a snap of this long suffering but patient hound as we passed his owner’s car on the A30, to be honest we couldn’t believe what we were looking at!

Perhaps the couple in question had been thinking about buying an estate car but then thought to heck with it and opted for a sportier model, but forgot all about Fido here- or perhaps the dog in the boot is a new edition to the family? Who knows.

Businesses and organisations across the world face the same dilemma with their brands. With our clients often the very first thing we ask is whether their brand reflects their currents status and the expertise they offer. After all the original values you held when you first started out may well have become outdated and your branding can easily become long in the tooth as a result.

If you need to upgrade your brand to fit the size you are now, then we can usually help. If you’re not sure email us we’ll send you some useful tips for free!

This is what Sharp’s joint Managing Director had to say: ”We set ourselves the objective of finding a top class design company in Cornwall. By restricting our search just to Cornwall the worry was that we would need to compromise. With Nixon there is no compromise, I am sure that we have found one of the UK’s best design companies on our doorstep in Cornwall.”

Oh, and here’s an insight into behind the scenes at the brewery:

One of the leading exponents of recumbent cycling, they asked us to rebrand the company so as to broaden its appeal as far as possible and reposition it at the forefront of the market.

We also designed a brand new website incorporating the rebrand and helping the company achieve its goals. The site was then built by the very talented team at Buzz .

The great news is that all our efforts and not least their investment in design has paid off handsomely, as Ben Rotheray from ICE explains:

“Good design is a good investment; our new branding and website have helped us double our sales. Nixon’s clear methodology helped us develop a great brand look and feel which all the team bought into. Our rebranding project has supported our new product positioning which has helped us to grow the business and drive incremental revenue.”

Thanks to the team at Heligan for making this project so fun. Special thanks to Sarah de Courcy for sending us this quote (which made us blush a little):

“We are absolutely delighted with our brand new website created by Nixon and are looking forward to sharing it with our online visitors. We were keen to update the site and make use of new facilities by offering podcasts and videos to further engage our online audience. Working with Nixon over the last few months, to get things just right, has been a real pleasure. We always enjoy working with local companies and supporting the community around us, but it is also important to know you are getting the best results possible. By working with Nixon you know that you are getting the best of worlds. We also greatly value the working relationship we have developed with Nixon over the years, which allows us to trust their understanding of our product and branding whilst aiding its growth and evolution.”

The area around Sagres in the very far western tip of the Algarve has much in common with Cornwall. It is, after all, quite literally the town at the Land’s End of Europe and shares the same rugged landscape and vast seascapes over the Atlantic Ocean. There is also a flourishing surf culture, albeit with a lot more waves, secret surf spots, larger beaches and higher cliffs.

My family and I have enjoyed many holidays further east towards Faro; whilst we stay high up in the hills away from the crowds, many Brits head for the busier and, to some, over developed coastal towns for their summer breaks.

Over the last few years Nixon have been closely involved with a new luxury resort project that hopes to bring something rather more sensitive and stylish to the market. Designed in a highly contemporary style and with a very unique offering, Martinhal will certainly stand out from the rest of the Algarve’s destinations.

Last month four of the team travelled out to see work in progress and conduct a series of branding workshops with around 40 members of the Martinhal team, across the board from director level to operational staff.  These workshops are always an insight and, perhaps most importantly, involve the very people who will ultimately make the Martinhal brand sing. The end result of all this work is a series of brand values that will clarify what the place stands for, both to guests and to the people who work within the resort.

Back home we’ve been relishing the creative challenge of creating the overall brand strategy, developing concepts for branding the entire resort and its facilities, including the extraordinary Hotel Martinhal, a stunning spa, three restaurants, retail outlets, and a home delivery food service to name but a few! In all there is much work to do and, with the hotel opening in April and the rest of the resort a few weeks later, not much time to do it all in, but a great opportunity and one which we are all relishing.

Baroness Greenfield in full flow

Last week we attended ‘The Edge’ organised by the Design Business Association (DBA). The event looked at the links between risk, creativity and success, kicking off with a day of workshops at the RIBA building in Portland Place. Day two saw around 300 delegates gather at The Circus Space in Hoxton where we were entertained, provoked and stimulating by an eclectic list of speakers, such as Baroness Susan Greenfield of The Royal Institution who  illuminated us on the links between creativity and intellect, Gary Low, Executive Chef at the Ivy not only fed us but also gave us his views about leadership and TV Producer Russ Malkin talked inspiringly about the links between risk and creativity.

Finally Rob Seymour from Seymour Powell wowed us all with his captivating talk, in which he extolled the virtue of watching people interact with objects and processes to learn how to improve things- It’s not what people say it’s what they do.

At the end of the day Deborah Dawton announced that the DBA would be working with 15 ‘bright sparks’ in 2010, and revealed that during the lunch break the various design ‘pioneers’ had identified several ‘high fliers’ who will now be invited to a series of exclusive masterclasses in 2010. Clearly  I must have said something of merit to Erik Spiekermann because they called my name out! For more information about the DBA and The Edge visit the site below or Red Cube Marketing’s blog here.

http://dbatheedge.com/home

Coffee time at Click

Darren, Chris, Jonathan and I attended Click 09 London last week. The event was organised by Creative Review and hosted at LBi’s offices in Brick Lane,  it brought together some of the leading digital, design and advertising agencies in the world to network, discuss best practice, and review the current trends in digital work with a special focus on how the future looks in this rapidly evolving and increasingly multi-media digital world we all live in.

It was fascinating to hear the likes of Nik Roope from Poke and James Hilton of AKQA talk in detail about their latest work, and how they see the sector shaping up. Several agencies are developing digital ‘products’ in close partnership with their clients, some good examples of this emerging new practice are the Eco:Drive project from Fiat developed by AKQA, see: http://www.fiat.com/ecodrive/

Nokia’s work with R/GA on their viNe application is also worth checking out at: http://vine.nokia.com/

In December we’re back in London attending ‘The Edge’- an event centered on the links between taking risks, creativity and success. Organised by the Design Business Association it should be great fun and we’ll report back in more detail soon.

This is a font or is it?

I’ve become bemused at the proliferation of fonts that look like handwriting – after all why can’t people just write things anymore? There’s even a typeface that looks uncannily like my own handwriting – see above. I seem to have developed a classic creative scribble over the years and I’ve noticed many other arty types from architects to fashion designers to fine artists also share the same personal font, (someone even asked me once whether I’d been taught to write like this at art school!) However, everyone can now turn their handwriting into a font, thanks to this new site called ‘fontcapture’, but personally I still suggest you use a pen… Link

Like an idiot I stared at this for ages trying to figure out where the fan was… then bought a pen for my friend’s birthday, wishing I could have been more generous and that they lived in a rather warmer place than Maida Vale. I’ve just seen online today that documents indicate that in the early 1980s, a Tokyo company called Shibaura Electric developed a nearly identical idea; however, it was never marketed. See LINK