When was the last time you stopped and considered how effectively you market your business’s green credentials? Many of us are so busy trying to get from one day to the next and see out the downturn that marketing our companies’ green credentials has slipped waaaaaaay down the agenda. But should it have done?

I’m mid-way through a series of seminars I’ve been asked to run for Gatwick Diamond businesses on Marketing Your Green credentials. And preparing for and running the workshops has been an interesting exercise. I wonder whether I’ve given enough thought to how I market Flourish’s green credentials, and whether it’s something that matters at the moment? Are consumers as concerned about green as they are about price at the moment? Can you leverage value and loyalty from being green?

Do our clients even understand what being green means? On twitter there was a little confusion I asked my followers: how do you market a sustainable business? And the responses were varied, and interesting. You’ll see from the responses below that despite the buzz-word, sustainable means different things to different people. And many simple weren’t sure what it meant at all!

@thebookwright: Thought for sustainable businesses need a short, medium & long term plan & a stable team of complimentary cornerstones

@essentialCM for sustainable businesses read good to great Jim Collins all about “building the clock” for the future.

@ElizabethCairns re marketing sustainable business …keep your passion alive and communicate that in your marketing messages

@JudithMorgan Wasnt sure if you meant sustainable, i.e. I still have a business in 30 years time, OR sustainable as we use that word now?

@paulfuggle: be clear about who you want to build relationships with, offer what they want & what you can deliver

@MarketingNYC stop being a tasmanian devil doing and trying everything…get a strategy

So is sustainability about reducing resources, the impact of your business on the environment, is it about sourcing locally, creating a business that will be around in 30 years? Is it about the way you treat your staff? Or is it about being socially responsible: about putting as much back into the local economy as possible and adding value where you can?

The truth is it’s probably all of the above. When I asked my first lot of delegates yesterday what sustainability meant to their business, one group came up with the answer “you need to be seen to be being green”. And at a truly cynical level, we can all “greenwash” our companies and pay lip service to the environment, but that’s something that both consumers and journalists will see through very quickly.

As Elizabeth Cairns said, you need to put green at the very heart of your business and communicate that with passion. Which leads me on to asking you the question: Just what shade of green is your business? Are you green to the core? Is the setup of your business focused around reducing the impact of your activities on the environment, sourcing responsibly, treating your staff well and working in the community? Is green at the heart of your business? Or is it on the perimeter? Have you felt as though you “ought to do something” and switched your paper buying from normal to recycled? Neither answer is right or wrong, but how you market your green credentials will very much depend on how much it matters to your business.

According to the experts, Egg – a branding & marketing company in the States, just 7% of consumers are socially responsible to the core, but 70% of the population (I’m assuming they’re talking about the population of the USA) will recycle and occasionally seek out organic food. So there’s a huge market out there for offering sustainable products. But you can’t badge your company “green” and hope that your product will walk off the shelves – there simply aren’t enough consumers that care to their core to make that happen.

No, what you need to do is engage your client with your values. And that’s why I asked you what shade of green your business is. Consumers are looking for brands with values that they identify with. Remember the John Lewis advert I showed you? Ok that’s not about “green”, but to me it’s about sustainability and it’s very much about values. And for their niche in the market, it’s an utterly powerful way of marketing.

Consumers are looking for brands to communicate with them honestly and create transparency. And that’s why you need to put your brand values at the heart of your marketing plan. And if “green” in whatever form is a part of your brand values then you’ll find it much more authentic to market your green credentials than if it’s a periphery activity.

If I think about brands that place green at the heart of their marketing strategy, I think of Dorset Cereals, Abel & Cole and Riverford. Their marketing communications are about so much more than say, how good the oats and raisins are in the cereal. They’re about community, sustainability and the environment. Dorset Cereals, in particular have taken their brand values much wider than food, their communication is about “simple pleasures”. They build edible playgrounds for schools and they team up with like minded businesses who share their values.

How clever is your communication? Dorset Cereals don’t continually bang the drum that “we’re green, we’re green” – it’s implied through their activities, their copy, their packaging and their design. Is your marketing strategy as sophisticated as that?

Green businesses have a positive impact on society. In the case of my business, that means looking after my staff well, sourcing our consumables responsibly, ensuring that the print we sell is environmentally friendly and putting something back into the community with our Flourish Foundation. If I’m honest, this is at the heart of me, which is why it’s come through in my business. I haven’t yet put together a “green mission statement”, and I probably should. I know that one of the reasons that our clients come to us is for our authenticity and values – but do I need a mission statement to get that across?

The short answer is probably not. Everything about the way we’ve built Flourish communicates these values, partly because we fall into the Autumnal colour personality, which is the most “green” of the lot. All of our print is recycled and uncoated and our muted, warm colours suggest sustainabillity, community and integrity. But marketing your green credentials takes more than a bit of fancy design and an understanding of colour psychology.

It’s about making sure that your communication is consistent. Follow us on twitter and you’ll find the very same person that you meet in the studio, warm, supportive and with integrity. Read our blog and you’ll find the same transparency and “giving” nature as you find in our workshops and one to one sessions. I guess I don’t scream green because green is intrexibly linked with what we do. How about you?

You know how much I rave about Bernay Laity and her colour psychology guru-ness. Well she’ll be training the second half of the Flourish team (Izzy, Ian and Rob) in Colour Psychology for Communication next week and we’re looking for business case studies to come and “get their colours done”.

If you’ve always wondered what your brand colours say about you then now is the time to get top notch expert advice… for free! Together with my team, Bernay will quiz you on the impression you’d like your business to create. You’ll discuss your business values, who your clients are and why they buy from you. We’ll use your answers to identify which season you fall into: Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter and then give you feedback on the colours, textures and fonts that you’re using at the moment and help you see how you can convey a more cohesive look.

You’ll leave with a bespoke colour palette that has been well thought through and designed to help your business communicate more effectively.

We have a number of one-hour slots available. If you’d like to book a free session simply email me and I’ll book you in!

I’ve been looking forward to blogging about this site now for several months, and I’m delighted to say that after much blood, sweat and tears, the Customer Essential website is now live <drum roll please>.

We have loved every moment of creating this website because of the freedom and encouragement that MD, Liz Machtynger, has given us to create something really special for her. Liz has had the foresight to realise that just because she’s working with corporate organisations, it doesn’t mean that she needs to strip out all semblance of her personality. And that’s really, really refreshing.

This is going to be a bit of an epic post because I’d like to take you on the Customer Essential rebrand journey and show you just how we’ve taken Liz’s brand identity from stark and soulless to emotive and engaging.

Here’s Customer Essential’s original website.

I don’t want to knock it too much; but you can see the dramatic transformation between the “before” and the after. The stark colours, clunky logo and overbearing passion flower do little to create a feeling or warmth or professionalism. Let’s just say it was time to move on…

We’ve already talked about creating the logo and stationery here. And the new logo was an important turning point in Customer Essential’s journey. In fact, since using their new logo on their email signatures and using their new style PowerPoint presentation for their proposals, the company have had a 100% success rate with proposals, and have even had to turn two clients down as they were too busy! Now that’s what I call a result.

But back to the website.

Creating a design with so much emotion, that really communicates the essence of the business, didn’t happen overnight. Initially we had discussed designing one page for Customer Essential which they’d be able to take to a web developer (one of the team has a family connection) for construction. To keep costs low we had spent half a day creating a smart (and much improved from their existing site) design. And here it is…

Now for many businesses this would be fine. It looks smart, it’s well structured and it has some clear calls to action. Liz was somewhat of a dream client because she accepted that this was a good design for the time that she had invested; but she wanted more, and was prepared to invest more to enable us to get there.

I hope you’ll agree that the investment has paid off.

The new design has heart and soul. It beautifully sums up the company’s integrity, passion and quirkiness. And yet despite encapsulating the true soul of the business; it still has credibility and professionalism. But getting there wasn’t easy.

I for one, found it very difficult to overcome the idea that the company works with customers, and yet we weren’t showing any people. And the reason for this was quite simple: it’s hard to find images of people that don’t look like “stock photos”. Both Flourish and Customer Essential wanted to create a look and feel that was better than corporate stock photography. We wanted to create an emotive reaction; and so the idea of journeys came about.

Through the brainstorming session we identified the “heart” of customer essential and developed this idea of journeys through nature. Each of the Customer Essential team are very Autumnal, with strong connections to community, history, academia and the outdoors. This really comes across in the style of illustrations and the photos we’ve used.

People often ask me where the frog came from on the contact form – quite simply it evoked such a positive reaction in all of us during the brainstorming that we couldn’t not use it! It felt like the perfect quirky mix of intelligence, earthiness and results.

I think you can really see how the mood board has come through in the final design.

Personally I love the welcoming and warm welcome, and the way that the images guide you around the site.

And I think the illustrations Chloe and Rob have created add a nice warm and approachable touch.

The fabulous Matt Pereira took photographs of each of the team, which look just stunning, and importantly approachable and professional at the same time. And Rob created “pinboards” for each team member with their favourite things (including their favourite music, which is a big passion for the group).

The site has taken a long time to conceive: in both the planning and the execution and build. And Liz has ensured that she has invested properly in this to get the very best outcome. Already the branding is paying dividends and I’m excited to see how the new website helps the company grow moving forwards.

You might remember I told you about the work we’d just started for Keeler and Co, a London based estate agency who won our “win a logo makeover” at the Best of Richmond’s exhibition back in early March. Well the Flourish fairies have been busy creating a stylish and strong logo for Nicola (above), and I’d like to show you a snapshot of the journey below.

Nicola is fiercely ambitious and has worked hard to create an agency with a good reputation. But she needed the Flourish touch to really communicate the confidence and professionalism she deserved to her clients. Here’s the current Keeler website:

So as you can see, we’ve kept with the black and magenta, because they’re strong winter colours that work well with the business personality. But we have moved the logo quite a long way forward. Once I’d taken the brief Chloe, Caroline and Rob created three options for Nicola and her team to look at.

Option One: and very close to the finished article! We tend to work quite hard on our initial concepts which means that we usually only need to make minor amendments at the sign off and changes stages.

Option two: personally I love this one. More understated and I love the brackets, but Nicola and her team fell in love with the flourishy ampersand which would have been too much mixed with the decorative brackets as well.

Option Three. Again, I love the pattern in the background, and so did Nicola. Circle logos can be difficult to work with so the shape of the other two is probably more practical, but the circle gives it a more fun and approachable edge (circles are very “spring” like – and spring is all about energy-forward and communication).

Chloe has taken the layout of option one and combined it with the pattern of option three to create a stylish and contemporary logo that Nicola can be proud to put on her boards.  And here’s the stationery…

What do you think?

I’m delighted to be able to finally show you the new brand identity for Guildford Barristers Chambers. The brief was to create a professional, distinctive and modern identity for the Barristers Chambers who predominantly include solicitors, but who are moving more into the consumer market alongside this.

We’ve created logos for each division, as well as stationery, business cards, a brand manual and website designs. George has also been working with the team on planning out how to get the best from their website and how to write powerful copy.

Here’s how the old Chambers website looked.

I actually quite like the ribbon-tied scroll in the header, but it’s clear that the circular logo could benefit from being more distinctive and having a stronger font. After much debate we identified the Chambers as being from a winter (or starlight) colour personality. This is the only family that contains black and is full of bright, clear colours as well as some icy shades. Starlight (or winter) businesses are distinctive, compelling and are at the top of their game, and this was the impression we wanted to create.

Caroline created a stylish and distinctive icon that works as well on their stationery as it will frosted into glass on their office doors and embossed into leather on their folders. Blue is a great logical and communicative colour, so it made sense to base the logo around that, including some more approachable purples for the public access element of the business.

The stationery is simple. No bells and whistles, just a strong alignment, good layout and clean, strong colours.

And here’s the mockup for the homepage. Guildford Chambers have a web development company that they know and trust, so they’ve asked us to mock up the pages for the site and their developers will build them. That way they get a site that functions exactly how they need it to, that also engages their clients effectively!

What do you think of Elizabeth Cairns’ shiny new blog? We designed and built her site in February, and were delighted when she asked us to swizz up her blog design last week.

Here’s Elizabeth’s old Typepad blog.

It’s full of compelling posts, but there are a few design obstacles which get in the way of instant enjoyment. First up, the multitude of colours, fonts and font sizes make for challenging, and somewhat distracting, reading. Secondly the font. Elizabeth has more about her than stolid, safe Verdana suggests. Georgia is much more up her street! It’s also hard to identify the blog or engage with it because of a lack of images.

Elizabeth asked us to help create her a more engaging blog that reflected the true essence of Amovita. The natural world is a big part of both Elizabeth and her business, so the Autumn leaves in the header were a logical choice. The Autumnal colour palette is very reflective of Amovita’s values and core principles and that’s where the inspiration for the rounded corners, the teal and the warm gold came from.

As we’d already built Elizabeth’s website, installing a blog was a relatively quick process. There are a few things that we’d like to add to in terms of design over the coming months, but I think it’s a dramatic improvement from where the blog is, and we look forward to it helping Elizabeth’s business to flourish!

I am sooooo excited to be able to share this with you! I met Tracey from Magenta Cakes at the Business Link What’s Stopping You event in Ewell in February. Tracey is in the process of setting up her cake business after a long stint in the City and she approached us to help her with her website, logo design and brand identity.

What impressed me most about Tracey was her vision for Magenta Cakes. She’s really thought through how she is going to run the business, and she has big plans for the future! To start with Tracey plans to deliver cupcakes, traybakes and loaf cakes to offices and she wanted us to help her convey a happy, celebratory and slightly kitsch look.

We identified Magenta Cakes as a Spring business: fun, approachable and people focused, hence the circles and bright, light, clear colours.

To start with we’ve created a logo and stationery. The website is to follow and I’ll be posting details of that very soon. Hope you like it!

It’s been a busy week in the Flourish studio this week, and today was no exception, with no less than two client brainstorming sessions (and a corporate photoshoot downstairs to add to the fun run by Matt Pereira!). And so aided with a couple of mugs of strong coffee and my homemade cakes (carrot; and lemon and poppy seed) we set to work.

First up was Greens Cafe, Crazy Golf and Grass Putting based in Padstow, Cornwall. We first started working with Sharon when I met her at a Business Link “Ask the Expert” panel I was presenting on for women starting their own businesses. Sharon was in the process of buying a going concern in Padstow (or should that be Padstein?) and asked us to help her come up with a brand for the business.

That was three years ago, and whilst much of the brand identity remains as relevant today as it was back then, Sharon’s business has moved on, and she was keen that we refresh and develop the brand. Her husband (and business partner) Ian had envisaged a character that instantly communicated Crazy Golf (perhaps a bit Where’s Wally-esque?). The couple were also very conscious that they had this stunning grass putting range with views over the estuary and very close to nature, that they simply weren’t taking advantage of, so that area of the business needed development.

The first step was to identify the key messages each of the areas of the business needed to communicate. The cafe: chilled out, wholesome food and spectacular views. The crazy golf: traditional family fun, intergenerational and active. The grass putting: close to nature, spectacular views, relaxing. So some common themes but also very distinct identities.

Once we’d identified the feel we were going for, it was chopping time! And so we chopped our way through a stash of magazines and catalogues as well as images that Sharon had collated before the session.

A taxing “cull” followed. If the cutting is the most fun, this is the bit where clients usually get the most value. This is where we take a jumble of ideas and turn them into something quite cohesive. It’s also where the dialogue between client and creative director and designer can be really compelling. Taking a mood board to your brand designers is really useful: creating one with them is invaluable!

Finally the sticking, mounting and plan for moving forwards; which involves illustrating the character (of course I’ll keep you up to date!) and designing signs (including fabulous cutout signs that visitors will be able to put their heads through and have photos taken in a cheeky seaside sort of a way!).

“This week” might be stretching things a bit, we designed this gorgeous logo for cafe, Root or Berry several months ago, and with the Flourish rebrand I’ve just been too busy to blog about it. But I love the logo and identity and so I couldn’t not share it with you!

Root or Berry is a new take on the juice bar/ salad bar concept. A small outlet on Guildford’s North Street, Root or Berry creates fresh juices, smoothies, soups and salads from fresh, raw ingredients of your choice. Fancy a vegetable soup with crispy croutons to take away? No problem: pick your raw veggies (either according to your own tastes or the suggestions on the menu board) and they’ll whizz you up a fresh and nutritious steaming soup in a matter of minutes.

Entrepreneur Chris Connor (we’ve worked with him at Pews, The Farriers, The Albany and the Squirrel) approached Flourish to create a fresh and engaging identity that would help Root or Berry stand out in a town that’s full of cafe and restaurant chains.

We identified from the brief that Root or Berry would best fit into the Autumnal palette. Earthy, strong, community and people centric as well as wholly natural, Autumn seemed like the logical step. And so the intense, muted burgundy and the zingy (but still muted) green were a great starting point for the design.

The icon (slices of fruit) was the one concept out of all the ideas we showed Chris that stood out the most for telling the Root or Berry story. I have to be honest, I don’t normally feel the need to “explain” what a company does in the logo, but the stacked fruit looked great and fitted so well with the concept that we just had to go with it.

The hand-sketched font represents the spontaneous, relaxed approach of Root or Berry but the slab serif keeps it rooted in reality and creates that important trustworthiness.

We also wanted to create a “stamp” that Chris could use on his sandwich bags and coffee cups. And so the Totally Pure stamp was born. Chris has also used this in the frosted window displays of the shop.

And here’s the stationery. Simple, clean and effective.

I feel very qualified to write this post at the moment. As the owner of a brand and marketing agency I work with a lot of small business owners are missing opportunities because their logo (and brand image as a whole) isn’t sending out the right signals. And as someone who has just been client, creative director and designer (along with my other fabulous designers in the Studio) for her own business, I can see things from the other side too.

The fact is that you really shouldn’t design your own logo. Here are just five reasons why.

1. You’re too close to it. Our clients tell us one of the most valuable things we bring to the table, aside from the design, is the perspective we help them gain on their business. Working with a branding agency on your corporate identity forces you to think about the way your business is structured and who your most profitable clients really are. Working with someone that’s not as close to your business as you will give you a different, and important, perspective
2. It’ll cost you more than you think. You think that design agencies get their design for free? Woah there tiger, think again. I have spent thousands on developing the Flourish identity. How? The cost of my staff and the opportunity cost of both my designers and I working on our own staff rather than billable client work. And if you’re not a designer I really, really recommend you focus on what you do best and let us get on with what we do best. More profitable all round, and  the end result will be better.
3. Unless you’re a graphic designer it’s unlikely you’ll choose the right fonts or colours. I’ve studied typography, colour psychology and logo design for years, as have my graphic designers. We understand how to evoke an emotion through a colour or a font. Are you confident that you can really send out the right signals with what you choose?
4. You probably won’t add the creative flair your business deserves. Great logos have wow factor. Something simple, but clever. And I don’t mean a Photoshop drop shadow (sooo nineties!) or a web 2.0 glassy reflection (oh so naughties). I’m talking a clever icon or creative treatment of your stationery that will get your clients taking you seriously.
5. You’re too close to it. Being so involved in the design process makes it incredibly difficult to make objective decisions. In the end, the only way we broke through our creative block was for me to completely disassociate myself from the design and act as client and Creative Director only. Once your blood, sweat and tears are removed you can once again strive for perfection!

I see now why other design agencies commission someone to design the logo for them! In the end we managed to crack it ourselves, with a few pep talks from family, friends and colleagues. But it was tempting to sub it out. And I have to say, I’m delighted with the end result. But if you’re not a graphic designer I really, really urge you to invest in a professionally designed brand identity. It’ll be one of the best decisions you ever make.