Clients

Everyone at Verbal Identity is delighted to share the news that we have been appointed by the tech start up “mobispot” to help them )launch. We will be developing a brand strategy, verbal identity and and copy for the website of this exciting new wearable technology firm.
mobispot will launch Spring/Summer 2013.
(April 2013).

SABMiller has operations in 75 countries and its brands are found in every great bar in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South America.

It sells  around 21 billion litres of lager per year.

The appointment of Verbal Identity follows our work in the summer on an internal communications program.

We will be working directly with one of the Global Brand Directors.

But right now, we are off to celebrate. By drinking beer. Possibly a lovely, cold, global, premium lager.

Tea Horse sells the world’s most interesting tea in the most interesting way.

The company was started last year by Ali Silk, an ex-ad agency brand planner.

(Do you think she’d sat through too many ad agency meetings, drinking too much insipid ad agency tea?)

She gave up her job, her income and her security to follow her passion. She travelled the world to source high quality leaf teas from reliable suppliers.

On her return, she realised that a problem she’d observed in her ad agencies could be turned into an advantage: consumers want to be increasingly promiscuous with their brand and variant choices, so why not help them do that?

Tea Horse launched as a subscription business.

For a small monthly fee, you receive sachets of four different, high quality leaf teas. Often the different varieties are linked by a theme: the season, the country of origin, the rarity.

Some are unusual. We’d never heard of Korean tea before Ali asked us to work with her.

Some teas are better versions of the familiar.

All are better than the tea bag stuff we’ve all been putting up with. But none of them is too grand to be called a cuppa.

The challenge, as with any start up, is to acquire new customers as efficiently as possible.

We are delighted to be working directly with Ali to use social media to identify those potential customers and to develop a verbal identity for the brand.

This will be used to help build a conversation strategy which will discover, engage and delight Tea Horse brand champions.

We are also retained to use this verbal identity to write copy for the monthly leaflets and for the website.

Verbal Identity is honoured that a global brand as famous and historic as Marriott Hotels and Resorts has asked us to help them develop their brand re-imagining.

We are also thrilled by the scale of ambition they have come to us with. The team at Marriott Hotels and Resorts want to make the brand as relevant and successful in the next fifty years as it has been in the last fifty.

We will work with Marriott Hotels and Resorts’ senior VP and his closest team in Washington, enhancing the work that has been done by Adam Morgan and his team at EatBigFish, London.

Our work will linguistics and creative writing, and a few late nights, to define the brand audience, the proposition and the brand’s key values.

Capturing a brand in words is never easy. Here, though, the brand is an ever-changing mix of the wide variety of human and physical embodiments of the company, and the million different activities that are performed every day by the team members.

The work will be complete by late Summer 2012.

SABMiller has operations in 75 countries.

It operates in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South America .

It sells  around 21 billion litres of lager per year.

It owns four premium brands,  Grolsch, Pilsner Urquell, Miller Genuine Draft and Peroni Nastro Azzuro, that are available in almost every great bar in  the world.

The success of those brands depends on consistent methods, perfect ingredients and maintaining a premium positioning – and letting everyone internally know what makes them special.

Verbal Identity has been appointed to work with their senior premium brand team to shape the internal communications.

We are delighted that the many  long hours and late nights which we have given to private research into the brewing industry and its products has finally paid off.

This project will complete in Summer 2012.

We are delighted to announce that we have been appointed to advise TalkTalk, one of the UKs biggest telecomms providers.

Currently we are advising senior decision makers on Social Media and the role of Verbal Identity in defining conversations with brands.

A simple visual and verbal identity on these London posters helped Selfridges had a distinctly merry, and recession-bucking Christmas.

When you want to capture someone’s imagination, it’s good to find a different way of looking at things. There is a distinct verbal identity associated with finding out that your flight’s delayed, but here’s how we thought of it.

What words can capture the feeling of having an awful cold while knowing that you just have to get into work that day? These words.

(This is a Campaign Press Awards winning ad).

Quite simply, MYLA revolutionized the British retail attitude to sex and we were very proud to have been part of this process. We worked with the brand owners from pre-finance concept stage (helping with naming and brand concepts), through development of the brand strategy (we focussed on ‘Real Sexy’ being a set of internally-originated feelings, rather than being dependent on someone else drooling over you) and finally taking this concept live by creating eye-catching ads with a thought-provoking verbal identity. MYLA is now a brand known around the world – and it’s known for the values we helped create.

What do you do when there’s nothing new to say? Find a new way of saying it. When I was at Saatchi & Saatchi with John Messum, we wrote a lot of the British Airways ads around new product launches and so were familiar with the brand’s ‘announcing’ tone of voice. But when it came to ‘just a price ad’, we had to discover the feeling (and invent the verbal identity) of a giddy weekend away.

Of course, sometimes the best way to say it is to just say it.

The New Tourneau Store, Madison Avenue.

You can see some of the new brand here at www.tourneau.com. But to experience what’s really happening with the rebirth of this 100 year old company, you’ll need to take a trip to New York. Things have changed from the top down and the carpet up.

In early 2010 we were summoned to New York by the relentlessly high-energy, relentlessly high-end retail group of consultants that was advising Tourneau. Little did we realise how important that energy would become.

We started things off like any good tourist – by visiting a Torneau store. Physically we were confronted by a barrier of the different watch brand’s cabinets. There were 90 watch brands in there, but not a single thread of evidence of a Tourneau brand or story.

The store was the biggest in the world – but that hadn’t been enough (they’d recently been acquired by a private equity firm) and that wouldn’t be enough: high-end brands were setting up their own dedicated boutiques, department stores were attacking the mid-range and the internet promises a wider selection than even Tourneau can carry and comes with clear, independent advice. Things had to change.

Capturing and bottling that relentless high energy, we crashed through the first workshop. Things were clearer – but only about how empty the brand had become. Another session, this time with renowned architects 8 Inc. (you’ve probably worshipped at one of their churches – they designed the Apple Store) and we were clearer, but no nearer.

We came back to the UK and started comparing the brand to what else was happening in the offline and online retail world. We cycled through a number of brand development tactics. We looked again at the online world. And then gave up and went for a coffee. Which is where inspiration struck.

In our local Nespresso store, we looked around and realised that the brand is fun because it does such a good job of introducing people to the different coffees of the world. We thought back to the over-eager salesman who’d accompanied us around the store… he scored 10/10 for persistence, that was for sure. But what he was really trying to do was share his passion with us: he really did care about the different brands. What he wanted to do was  be our guide.

We realised that more than anything, everyone at Tourneau doesn’t just want to sell us a watch, they were as passionate about the objects as we the shoppers were. As we discussed this with Tourneau’s brand team and the consultants, we had the breakthrough thought: At Tourneau, we don’t sell watches. We help people discover them.

After that, things started moving quickly. Like all good strategic brand thoughts, ad lines and brand ideas soon suggested themselves. We realised that the store needed to allow us to flow around the beautiful objects in the glass cases, instead of using the glass cases as a barrier. We needed all that independent advice that’s available on the internet brought into the store, and shared intelligently with the customers. We needed magazines about watches to kindle our passion. And we probably needed a ‘shearing shed’ where we could sit and sign the cheque.

We developed more advertising and positioning lines. We met with the team to talk about a new verbal identity for the brand, one which would reflect this sense of guided discovery.

8 Inc started on a new store (on Madison Avenue), and while builders worked on that night and day, another type of builders worked on the website. We were asked back in recently to tweak the final verbal identity of the copy on the site and now the new Tourneau brand is born.

Next time you’re in NY, drop in. Even if you don’t want to buy a watch, we’re pretty sure you’ll want to buy a watch.

Our thanks to Mr Jim Seuss CEO and the team at Tourneau; Susy Korb & Susan Towers, (Nice Partnership).

In 2007, we worked with London’s most creative media agency, Naked, to produce a new brand and communications for Kaupthing Bank. We were responsible for a thoughtful, competitive brand and positioning, a distinct Verbal Identity, a brand advertising campaign, the launch of the IceSave card, an extensive worldwide internal communications campaign and personalized gifting programs for HNWI.

We were not responsible, however, for the subsequent global financial crisis.

We are delighted to announce that we have been appointed by the private equity firm that has taken ownership of the House of Hardy Amies to produce the brand’s new verbal identity, verbal branding and brand strategy.

Here’s how we went about it.

Sir Hardy Amies was a sharp-witted, self-confessed social-climber. He would have needed no guidance himself in styling the brand’s verbal identity. But as happens a lot when the walking-talking embodiment of a brand gives up walking and talking, those left behind have conflicting views of how their brand should think and talk about itself.

I took an evening off thinking about the verbal strategy to go and hear Stephen Sondheim at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Two interesting things from that evening:

1. Yes, the man who wrote West Side Story is indeed still alive.

2. He pointed out the subtle difference between Noël Coward and Cole Porter: both were verbally playful and both were obsessed with teasing high society, but Cole Porter was born into that world and wrote affectionately about it (take a song about a great party: “Well, Did You Evah!”) whereas Noel Coward was an outsider and couldn’t help himself from mocking it (take a song about a great party: “I Went to a Marvellous Party”).

Inspired, I returned to Savile Row and explained to the new owners of the Hardy Amies’ brand the difference between being droll and being bitchy – and about how every piece of a brand’s communication (from the ad campaign to the website blog, from the Chairman’s speech to the legalese at the bottom of the emails) needs to be written with an appreciation of the consumer’s world which is as deep as the consumer’s.

Our 3 month project to develop the Verbal Identity is now underway – and the world’s other greatest living Stephen has already become a fan.

If you’d like to find out about the creative standards Stephen Sondheim sets himself and how he feels when he doesn’t meet them, listen here: Front Row podcast

If you’d like to find out more about how defining a Verbal Identity can change a company’s thinking as much as its communication, please email me.

We are delighted to announce that we have been appointed to handle a project for one of the world’s big 4 oil companies.

So why the big name secrecy?

It’s not because we don’t believe that oil companies are a legitimate part of our economy. They are. The world would start squeaking pretty loud, pretty soon, without its regular supply of oil.

We don’t believe that oil exploration doesn’t come without cost. The oil companies don’t believe that and we don’t either. But if we’re committed to a petro-chemical world (and if you drove to work this morning, or ate anything today that you didn’t grow yourself from scratch, you’re committed to it too), then we need to be committed to a way of making that world find the petro-chemicals more efficiently with less damage.

No, there’s a more practical reason why we won’t tell you the name of the Big 4 Oil Company we’re working for – they have a big dirty agency of record and no one wants to upset them. At least not yet.

However, we’ve been on an interesting passage of discovery sitting with real boffins, people who get to go to scrap yards and lazer cut engines in half just to see what’s inside. We’re firing up our O Level chemistry to try and remember what long chain molecules do and don’t do. We’re searching back to our days working on ad campaigns for P & G and relearning the role of the RTB. And we’re using all of linguistic skills and creative writing skills to try and find a way to describe a truly innovative engine oil additive in a way that is truly motivating.

Stay tuned for more information.

A big growly account man at my first agency (a place I still refuse to acknowledge in my bio) was the kind of man who could get clients to do anything he wanted. He had more stories than David Niven ( he presented a convincing case that it was he and not Freddie Mercury who’d written Bohemian Rhapsody), he drank copiously without getting drunk and every single night he’d take random junior members of the agency to late night members’ clubs where he’d show them prestidigitation and magic tricks that left you thinking, “He probably actually is in league with the Devil.” Mentoring wasn’t his agenda but he did teach me something about clients. You should have them for only one of three reasons: to win awards, to make money, or to have fun.

It’s early days for The Left Shoe Company so I don’t expect to get rich from them (…at least not yet -if you’re reading this Erkan and Clive).

If their communications is as good as their product, awards will come, in time.

But straight from the go, this brand is fun. This is a range of made to measure shoes, which uniquely, through a large range of choices of style, leather and sole become totally individual – you can even have your Twitter handle stamped into the insole. The fitting process, where a computerised scanner whirs around your foot, taking about 2 million measurements in 30 seconds is fun. And Clive and Erkan, the two guys heading the new business are determined and focused. (And charming – Clive was the man who brought Richard James to the world and remembered me even though it’s been 5 years since he last served me in Savile Row.

The Left Shoe Company has just produced their new brand identity, from our friends at www.Saturday-London.com (who are part of Mother London, the last ever agency I worked at).

They’ve just completed a beautiful relationship with Virgin Atlantic, where they were offered some space in the Heathrow Clubhouse.

Now, they have turned to us to ask for a Verbal Identity and comms activity in Social Media. What’s impressed us most is that rather than saying, “Give us everything on every platform”, they’ve decided to stick a toe in the water and start on Twitter. It’s a smart move, start small and understand how to walk before you run. (Yes, you find yourself writing even more ambulatory metaphors when you work on a shoe brand).
We’re working on the heart of the brand, and from that we’ll develop the language of the brand, the character of the brand, and the voice of the brand – all the elements of an effective Verbal Branding.

But more than that, we’ve said that Good Conversation is 51% listening – so as the brand moves onto Twitter, a large part of its Verbal Identity will come from listening to consumers and what they want.  Social Media provides such an amazing opportunity to connect with consumers and find out what they’re talking about, it’s exactly the right place to start honing the brand strategy.

Stay tuned. It’ll be fun.