Blog and News

Coley Porter Bell has taken a top prize at The Drinks Business awards 2013 with its work for Olmeca Altos Tequila.

At the same time a packaging idea for Beefeater gin conceived by Coley Porter Bell but executed by Chivas Brothers has won in the best consumer campaign category.

Both were the work of Coley Porter Bell creative director Stuart Humm.

The winning award comes in the ‘best design and packaging for spirits’ category and saw Olmeca Altos beat off competition from some of the most innovative and compelling spirits designs of the last two years. They included Webb deVlam’s cutting edge work for Bombay Sapphire Electro which lights up in your hand when you pick it up.  And there was Stranger and Stranger’s surreal retro fantasy design for Don Papa Rum.

The brief was to distinguish Olmeca Altos from the rest of the Olmeca range by creating an appealing personality for the brand, while making the bottle easier for bartenders to handle.

But when it comes to innovative integrated marketing, perhaps the co-creation employed by Beefeater’s My London was more significant because the packaging idea formed the basis of the communication campaign.

It was conceived as a limited edition pack for Beefeater to showcase the creativity and multi-faceted nature of London. The design uses thousands of photos uploaded by the public entering a competition to demonstrate ‘what London means to them personally’. The campaign was created by Chivas Brothers specifically to generate ‘content’ for the new design. A QR code on the sleeve takes consumers to a YouTube video of the bottle being created.

Hyper-connectivity is creating a generation of Spock-like consumers with high IQs, but little empathy, Baroness Susan Greenfield told Coley Porter Bell this week.

Speaking at the House of Lords where she was being interviewed by senior planner Ed Silk for Coley Porter Bell’s 2013 Visual Futures presentation: ‘Eureka: how a renewed interest in science is informing a new visual language for brands’, Baroness Greenfield was explaining the implications of new technology for the human brain and human behaviour.

She argued that the human brain adapts “exquisitely” to its environment. “Now the environment is composed of just two dimensions –sound and vision, the brain will adapt to that,” she said.

“Marketers are now selling stuff to people with a much less robust sense of identity, shorter attention spans who want to be hyper-connected and therefore perhaps have less empathy with others. But at the same time they have very high IQs and can make connections very fast.”

She predicted that marketing in the future will be primarily about segmenting through experience rather than the provision of ‘things’. “Objects are already smart. That will increase. And when you have Google glasses and Facebook phones, everything will be even more personalised as you walk down the high street.”

She added that brands will need to adjust to new ideas of what constitutes desireability. “The old idea was that brands say something about you. Now status is more to do with ‘cool’ than mere objects. Coolness is not about owning a Rolex or a Bentley, it’s about something that will get you followers.”

The full interview with Baroness Greenfield will be available on our web site closer to the Visual Futures presentation on June 26.

Coley Porter Bell staffer Will Moore has won the training prize from the Account Planning Group with a strategy he helped devise for Eurostar.

Will was a member of one of eight teams briefed by the APG to provide strategic recommendations for how Eurostar should respond to a new German competitor, Deutsche Bahn, entering the cross channel rail market.

Rejecting the obvious pitfall of focussing on market share, Will’s group instead devised a two step plan to grow the cross channel rail market.

The plan identified two opportunities for passenger growth. The first was from inbound non EU tourists who tend to stay longer and spend more than local tourists. Strategic alliances were proposed with airlines, so tourists could say arrive in London but leave Europe from Paris or Brussels. International hotel chains could also be partners –creating integrated offers for stays in different capitals.

In the past decade cultural and heritage tourism has increased by 15% a year. This provided the second targeted strategic opportunity focused on ‘Europeans with curious minds’.

These two strands would allow Eurostar to talk of itself as ‘champions of connecting culture’, giving it a higher social purpose,” says Will.

Will and his team win a prize of £260 to spend on a wild night out. With that budget, it is unlikely to be in Paris or Brussels.

The Grocer has reported the launch of two extensions to Nestle’s ‘barista-style’ instant coffee brand Azera, with packaging created by Coley Porter Bell. CPB also created a key visual used in a three million pound advertising push to support the launch.

The new latte and cappuccino flavours are part of Nestle’s efforts to “up” its presence in the £25m a year barista style coffee category, the magazine says.

The report goes onto say that Azera was launched last year and is targeted at young professionals.

Azera is the first micro ground with ‘crema’, the velvety cream layer that accumulates on the surface of the coffee that gives espresso machine coffee its distinctive appearance.

Coley Porter Bell has created a new corporate identity for the White Knight Laundry company, which offers domestic laundry services, business and industrial laundry and linen hire.

The brief to Coley Porter Bell was to rejuvenate the brand so that it reflects the company’s core strengths and differentiates it from its rivals, balancing heritage with modernity.

White Knight holds the Royal Warrant. This informed the design of the new logo which is based on pieces of White Knight’s linen, folded origami-style, to create a knight’s helmet. It is set against a regal purple background, with lettering in a crisp white Century Gothic.

Importantly, it has been created in such a way that it can be consistently reproduced across a very wide range of applications, materials and media. “It’s ironic that the industry is about creating good first impressions, because most of the players don’t,“ said Coley Porter Bell creative director Stephen Bell. “They all look very samey, very cold.” “The identity expresses the strategic thought ‘Laundry your way’. It reflects both the category and the fact that White Knight tailors its services to the client’s needs,” he added.

White Knight operates both in the B2B sector – industry, hotels, restaurants, education and healthcare as well as serving individual households throughout the South and Southeast of England. “Laundry is differentiated massively on quality, with pool linen at one end and high quality 5 star linen at the other, but the players are poor at communicating this. As top end providers we hope to depend on this powerful brand to make that point. We can provide the high quality service throughout the range that others can’t. Hence our strap line: ‘Laundry your way’,” said Robert Adams managing director of White Knight. ENDS