With 26 fantastic stores, an Italian restaurant, coffee shop, health club and landscaped plaza, there’s something at Marshall’s Yard for everyone! Whether you want to shop until you drop, enjoy a leisurely meal or simply sit and watch the world go by, Marshall’s Yard is the place to be.

The 1st floor Studio looks out across the retail park, and offers open plan production, meeting and ‘brainstorm’ areas in a bright, modern stylish space which is complimented by the Listed Building’s distinctive features and decor.

Combined with our Sparkhouse Studios situated on the University campus in Lincoln, and The Turbine Innovation Centre in Worksop. All of our offices are ideally situated to offer clients a convenient, out-of-office meeting place to discuss new and on-going projects in comfortable surroundings, over great coffee.

The Symbient networking event, held as an introduction platform for people working in Gainsborough and the surrounding areas, aims to bring people together to meet and introduce their services, whilst at the same time introducing guest speakers to advise, encourage and inspire the audience.

The guest speakers at this pilot event have been chosen carefully for their combination of skills and experience.

Dan Terry inspires fresh thinking combined with ideas and practical business tactics that truly drive the points home. Dan’s repertoire includes professional speaker and coach, master of neuro-linguistic programming, host of the ‘Fabulous Friday Feeling’ seminars and accomplished after dinner speaker. As opinion continues to be divided over the real state of the economy, Dan will offer insight into “how to hit the sweet spot in sales’ – a fast moving micro-presentation and Q&A session.

John Batty who will also be speaking at the event is the founder of Bluejohn Marketing and has also recently appeared on BBC’s Dragon’s Den. Following a career in the automotive industry, John then went on to spend fifteen years working in the construction and utility sectors before setting up Bluejohn Marketing in 2003. Bluejohn Marketing now undertakes marketing and business development projects including strategic marketing plans, contract bids, market research, marketing communications and promotional campaigns. John Batty also chairs a number of conferences and seminars as well as running bespoke training courses for a number of high profile clients.

Timelessness
Research has found that the average shelf life of a company logo is twenty years. Although the logo may change very slightly in this time period, the changes are usually evolutionary rather than sudden. The logo needs to be able to stand the test of time and therefore shouldn’t be anything too fashionable, as it will wear out much quicker than a more classic design.

Malleability
Good logos need to work across all marketing items. There’s no point in having a logo that works on the side of a lorry, but that’s never going to be able to be embroidered onto tops or printed onto pens. When looking at choosing a logo in the first instance, the entire marketing mix must be looked at. This includes stationery, merchandising, uniforms, advertising and a host of other items.

Simplicity
Companies are now creating much more simplistic logos due to the ‘brand overload’ that we are being subjected to on a daily basis. The fast pace of living nowadays also means that customers don’t have the time to look at detailed logos. They want something instantly recognisable and this means the more simplistic the logo is, the better.

Logos are always going to be subjective and what one person loves, another will hate. It’s important to remember that you can’t possibly please everyone. As long as a logo is chosen that works well, it doesn’t really matter what the overall reaction is to it. As it becomes synonymous with your brand, people will stop looking at it as an individual design. Instead it will begin to communicate the brand as a whole.

The logo for the 2012 Olympics cost a reported £400,000 to develop and was aimed specifically at the younger, “internet generation”. Inspired by graffiti artists, the logo was hailed as “dynamic” and “edgy” by organisers. The logo took the best part of a year to develop and was received extremely well from the test groups. However, when officially launched, the logo was met with widespread disapproval with the logo being described as “an uninspiring emblem”, “a purile mess” and “an artistic flop”.

Worse was to come when the logo was translated into a promotional video. The video had to be pulled immediately after it was reported that eight people had to be hospitalized after viewing the footage due to the flashing graphics having triggered epileptic seizures.

A similar situation arose recently when the BBC unveiled the new BBC News rebranding. The £550,000 redesign received complaints that the spinning motion of the graphics had left viewers “dizzy” and “nauseous”.
The rationale behind the rebranding was to consolidate the BBC news channels across all platforms into one stronger brand. Again, viewer surveys had been conducted before the redesign had been launched and the feedback was positive with the overall reaction being that the branding was “clear, unfussy, direct, straightforward and fresh.”

Possibly the most humorous logo to be unveiled recently is the one of the Office of Government Commerce. The logo cost £14,000 and took just under a year to design. It was intended to reflect the body’s aim of “improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement”.

The new logo, which had already been printed on marketing items such as mousemats and pens, was proudly unveiled to staff at the OGC who noticed straight away that the logo was destined to end in tears (of laughter) when rotated 90 degrees clockwise.
However, rather than retract the new logo and start again, the OGC has decided that having spent the cash, the logo is going to be stuck to. And why not? The new logo has produced more media coverage and column inches than would have been gained otherwise and due to the increased coverage, the logo is already recognisable. What could be better?!

If you are in the market for a cost effective branding reminder which is sure too stay visible – get in touch – the possibilities are endless!

We issued an e-newsletter to clients with updated information about the company. Due to the fact that this e-bulletin was hitting in-boxes on the morning of April 1st, we took the opportunity to have some fun and incorporated a spoof story.

The April fool gave details of a spoof new client who distributes a revolutionary new water named H2O NO! It was claimed that the bottle contained no actual water, only ingeniously packaged hydrogen atoms. As the drinker unseals the cap, oxygen is allowed to enter the bottle in a scientifically controlled manner. The resulting chemical reaction leaves an exact bottle full of water, ready to drink.

What we didn’t know was the hyperlink to the spoof webpage was forwarded on to thousands of people around the world with hits from America, India, Thailand and China as well as throughout Europe.

Mark (our resident Business Development bod) was shocked at the results when he saw the speed at which the link was being forwarded on.

“We analyse the hits on our website on a regular basis after sending out an e-bulletin so we can monitor its effectiveness and see how many people are reading it. I was amazed when I saw that the page of our website that contained the spoof story was getting literally thousands of hits.”

After investigating, it came to light that people who had received the link as part of the e-bulletin had then forwarded the link to the spoof page on to friends around the world.

Embarrassingly though, not everyone seemed to get the joke. Mark was shocked to receive an email from a boutique hotel in Bangkok asking whether there were going to be any Thai stockists of the water.

“At first I thought that they were playing an April fools joke on me when they asked where they could get hold of the water. However, it transpired that they were being serious so I had to explain that it had been a joke and that, in fact, the product doesn’t exist.”

You can check out the spoof at http://www.ideafuel.co.uk/h2ono/