Lots of people have a strange appreciation for what ’Marketing’ is and often conflate its key activities with Sales Lead Management and Sales Admin - where you see several joint Sales and Marketing Managers and Directors, where for me that is almost as skewed as being a Marketing and Finance Director - quite separate and different disciplines really - where one requires you to spend money and expand typically, and the other to curb activities and cut costs as an extreme example!

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Successful branding is almost always down to preparation and detail; very seldom is a logo or emblem plucked out of thin air. Before a Logo can be specified, a brief is required, and before a proper design brief is written, you need a detailed and well-considered Brand Profile. The Brand Profile sets down on paper all the necessary descriptive words and abstracts which fully represent the identity and personality of your brand. To get the best possible quality of results, you need to engage in ...

Branding is forever a full-time and a fully 360° vocation. It’s about seeing all the angles and dealing with them in a scientific and progressive manner. As with many task-oriented disciplines, consideration is everything, and every tiny detail can make a difference.

As both a University and Advertising Industry educated Marketing and Brand Specialist, I will always put the teachings of Abraham Maslow above those of Philip Kotler. The essence of Marketing is discerning and ...

As part of our Brand Profile exercise, I encourage our Clients to visualise their customers’ ecosystems - both their working and home environments and what influencers may be active in their lives. It typically falls under the ’Brand Relatives’ part of the process, but when considering a Target Audience, one must always consider the immediate environment/s they are active within. Both in terms of what touchpoints they access regularly, and also how these may instruct and ...

Affino has been working with Nick, Katrina, Marc and Rachel of Humanity Direct for the better part of a year now, to update and improve its brand and site experience. Right from the start it was felt that the core branding needed updating to better reflect the values of the organisation. Much of Humanity Direct’s activities are focused on Africa, so we looked for graphical references and inspirations from that continent. Settling in the end on African poster art of the 50’s and 60&...

A big part of our daily operation involves design - designing logos, icons, screens, applications, infographics and interfaces. We spend many hours browsing through image, video, sound and font libraries - all in pursuit of the best possible results. The trickiest thing about design though is the language of communication and reference, maintaining objectivity and overcoming the challenges of singular perspective and personal bias. There is a subjective component to design for sure, but we try ...

As business moves increasingly online, there is ever more competition - way beyond traditional local / national / continental borders. For many businesses - being online means you are competing for customers against diverse businesses located far far away from your own. There are numerous ways in which you can forge a stronger market position; way before you start thinking about promotional activities, SEO keywords and PPC campaigns, you should be thinking about the ideal brand experience you ...

On the latest Millward Brown BrandZ ’Global Top 100’ listing, Apple has overtaken Google by quite a significant margin. No doubt this has a lot to do with the phenomenal sales success of the iPad, as well as continuing strong retail performance across most divisions.

Our own household has slowly and steadily, not particularly deliberately, become rather Apple-fied. It started with iPods and iPhones, then a MacBook Pro or two, and now includes iMacs, iPads and Apple TV. I’m not ...