COMMS IS NOT MY THING!

This post is dedicated to doing some personal reflection regarding the brand boards and particularly communication planning.

Over the past few weeks I have been working really hard on my brand boards. I thoroughly enjoyed designing the first board surrounding the brand and its values, as well as the second board which visualises and informs about the Fortitude consumer groups. I was and am confident with the content and visuals that I have included in these boards. These two boards were pretty much finalised well over a week ago. I am proud of myself that I dove straight into the board board creations, despite feeling a bit lost to begin with.

Reflecting on my learning throughout this degree as a whole, I truly find the communications aspect of marketing hard to grasp. I just don’t think I am creative enough. In the previous Marketing Strategy and Communication module I was fortunate to be shortlisted to present my final ideas back to the Gymshark team. I knew that the comms aspect to my ideas was my weak point, and I was in awe of some of the comms ideas and strategies that the other girls had come up with. Going forward with other university projects, I was inspired to work on my comms planning and be more creative with my ideas for example the use of mock ups to bring the ideas to life. However this has proved to be much harder done than said…

Thinking about the comms for this project and the launch of Fortitude has proved incredibly difficult for me. All along I had planned for my third brand board to be associated around my comms ideas for Fortitude. Due to my struggles with coming up with comms ideas, I had been putting off doing my third brand board and only started working on it over the past few days. I have tried really hard to be creative with my ideas but it is all still a work in progress. I have created a third brand board which I am somewhat happy with - it is inspiring, engaging and informative to an extent, but there is definitely still more work for me to do regarding the comms. I just need to be more specific with my ideas, ensure that they target and satisfy the right consumer/audience and are visually and emotionally stimulating. I hope I will develop further clarity with my ideas through further research so that I can clearly communicate them in word form in the Brand Launch Pack.

BRAND IDENTITY BOARD

“A brand identity board is just a summary of the main guidelines to take into account as you design visuals for your audience”

Last Friday, Simon and Mishka provided a really valuable session on brand identity and its importance. One thing that was covered was the concept of a brand identity board, and how they are key to maintain branding across all touch points. I have previously experimented with designing one of these for some marketing volunteering that I did for a local hair salon, so I do have some basic knowledge on this.

We had been asked to create a brand identity board for our brands to share with Simon and Mishka and the rest of the cohort for this Friday coming up. Mishka and Simon emphasised that we should not view this as any extra work that will hinder our progression with our summative pieces of work. I have no doubt that some students will view this as extra unnecessary work, but I do not think like that. I want to take onboard what I have learned from Mishka and Simon and put it into practice. So here is my attempt at a brand identity board for Fortitude:

LOGO DEVELOPMENT

A few weeks ago I conducted some primary research regarding my logo design and I wrote a blog post about how I had confirmed my logo (which I thought I had). With more research and tutor guidance, I have since developed my logo which I am now more happy with.

I was always slightly concerned that my logo, that I thought was confirmed, was too simplistic. Taking into account the level of creativity of this module, I thought maybe I could have explored my creative ideas further. Though I had these doubts, my logo idea could definitely be justified by the fact that the brand is high-end and luxury; it’s quite common for luxury brands to simply have their brand name in one typography as their logo. For this reason, I was content with what I had created and moved onto the other brand identity elements such as colour palette and typography.

This morning Mishka and Simon, our lovely Vis Comms lecturers, provided us with a valuable session surrounding branding and logo design, that made me rethink my logo design. During their session, before I had the chance to show them and get personal feedback, I began playing around with Illustrator. I thought, ‘is there a way that I could incorporate an icon or shape, or even edit one of the letters, to better represent the brand and give the logo some sort of meaning and/or recognition?’ After having an experiment, I then shared what I had done with Mishka and Simon on the live session to see what their genuine thoughts were. I showed them 3 logo designs; my first one which was simply ‘Fortitude’ in an a singular typography, and then two which both incorporated a shape to represent the whoosh of a wave which I replaced the ‘O’ with. The feedback was highly valuable. Mishka rightly pointed out that although luxury brands do tend to just have typography as their logo name, their establishment and brand story and history behind the brand can make up for it. It made me think that because my brand is fresh and contemporary and it’s not well-established, maybe I needed to add another dimension to the logo to make it unique, stand out and better reflect the concepts behind the brand.

I am glad that I spent some time further experimenting with my logo to incorporate another dimension to it by adding the whoosh wave icon to replace the ‘O’. I have decided to go with the whoosh wave icon that is a little bit more subtle and artistic, as I experimented with one that was more weighted and icon-like, and it looked like it could be associated with a surf brand. I have mostly been designing the logo in white to be displayed against coloured backgrounds such as cobalt blue, but I would still like to see what the logo would look like in black, or even the cobalt blue as this is a key colour part of Fortitude’s primary colour palette.