The Challenge
When Preethi mentioned Behind the Brand all the way back in June, Heavenly jumped at the chance to play a role in shaping this groundbreaking event and to create and bring to life a brand for our peers in the region.
From day one Preethi had a clear idea about what she wanted to do and achieve with the event (a model client!) and so over emails, coffees and late nights as the event concept began to take shape, so did our initial thinking on the many opportunities for this exciting brand.
The Solution
The whole team was very clear about what we wanted – a modern, clean, interesting brand that was professional yet quirky, strong enough to hold its own in a sea of brands, yet subtle enough not to hog the limelight. After all, Behind the Brand is a platform from which to discuss other brands in the region. What we didn’t want to do was to create yet another bland brand for the sake of it. Behind the Brand has a purpose and it stands for something and our goal was to capture that.
After developing our strategic foundations, the strategy and creative teams then worked hand in hand on the big idea. Michael Wolff - branding guru extraordinaire, co-founder of Wolff-Olins and creative consultant at Heavenly – played a key role in process.
Juan Pedraza, Design Director said, “The creative solution for the Behind the Brand identity came to us as soon as we saw the brief. It was one of those situations where the answer to the problem was staring at you in the face. We loved the name and what it stood for from the beginning and it was obvious to us that the whole identity for the event had to be driven by its name. So, we took it literally and developed a simple and iconic mark that did exactly that – looked behind the “B”rand – and then applied our “B” mark to a whole manner of branded items in a guerrilla style. This approach was well suited to the main sentiment of the conference – an uncompromised look beyond the surface of branding issues.”
In partnership with Juan’s teams’ efforts, Nick Sunderland, Strategy Director, and his team created the core messaging and tonality for the brand again taking a literal yet considered approach to create our brand mantra…
‘Inside out, upside down, underneath, behind, around, flipped, inverted, broken down, reconstructed, reinvented, revealed. BEHIND THE BRAND.’
And again, rather than creating something new for the sake of it, we decided to use thought-provoking quotes from industry experts to act as the attention-grabbing headlines in our brand communications – for example:
‘Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them and sometimes it’s an ad.’
Howard Gossage: Freeman Mandar and Gossage
“Often our biggest mistake as managers is believing that, in general, customers care about your brand. They do not.”
Professor Patrick Barwise: London Business School
Where possible, the Behind the Brand communications used existing branded artwork on which we applied the “B”, or in the case of the more functional event collateral items such as the notebooks and agendas, the iconic “B” took center stage. Production was undertaken in partnership with Orchid Paper Merchants and Zabeel Printing Press who kindly donated their time, stocks and services for free to engage with our audience and support the event.
The Results
The response to the new brand has been fantastic, from the many positive comments from peers before and during the event, through to attendees asking for spare notebooks to pass onto friends and colleagues and seeing Adwomen members still carrying these around Dubai days later.
As for the future of Behind the Brand, we at Heavenly believe the inaugural event on the 7th October was just the start of something really great for our industry and we’re very much looking forward to partnering with Preethi and the Adwomen team to evolve the brand and event experience as the event goes from strength to strength.
Helena Carless,
Regional Director, Heavenly Middle East