Tyler Mallison
According to the Grocer, Kraft Foods is about to unveil its latest innovation in spreadable cheese to the UK market. It’s an indulgent mash-up of two key tasty ingredients (soft spreadable cheese and chocolate) as well as, more importantly, two of its key power brands in their respective categories: Philadelphia and Cadbury.
As an indulgent spread targeted towards ‘guilty snackers’ — women aged 25-40 who want to eat healthily but also want an indulgent snack— it will be interesting to see what share of the market it can steal from the leading chocolate spread, Nutella.
When consumers vote with their baskets, will they impulsively choose the child-like chocolatey option marketed as “healthy” due to its ingredients — or make a conscious choice to cut the calories by nearly 50% and opt for the new Philadelphia spread?
But perhaps more fundamentally, without a rich tradition of cheesecake, and chocolate cheesecake in particular, as in the US, this may be a big ‘leap’ for British consumers. Regardless, given that so much of the nation wholeheartedly embraces such oddities as Marmite, there’s definitely hope.
As for me, I think it sounds quite nice— especially on a digestive biscuit.
Stef Gilmore and Tyler Mallison
So we can’t tell you what you will be seeing glide down the runway over the next few weeks, but we can let you in on some the urban/street trends that you can expect to see at the end of the year, thanks to our recent trip to Bread & Butter, Berlin. As ever, there were numerous trends in varying degrees, so we have picked out 4 of our favorites.
colorful continues
Having been around for a couple of seasons now, colorful bottoms continue to trend, but in a more quirky, detailed way. Key players and jean specialists showcased creatively colorful jeans – they have experimented with dyeing effects, different prints and piecing. Brands including G-Star and One Green Elephant are continuing to brighten up the high street.
Spot the details
We noticed an increase in unconventional identity placement and quirky detailing a while ago but Bread & Butter confirmed our suspicions. Brands are stepping beyond traditional fashion cues to increase product engagement. Peter Werth is continuing to buck tradition by moving their shirt logos down from the breast to less assuming areas. Also, Mood of Norway is replacing traditional care label information with witty sayings like “made with love by really really pretty blonde girls”.
Eye eye
According to the show, there doesn’t have to be bright sunshine to wear bright shades come autumn. This AW you can expect classic, vintage shaped shades in bright, modern materials. Brands like Spitfire, Lotho and Adidas Original have produced gorgeously bright yet distinctly vintage glasses for AW12.
Dandy does denim
Given the display of sharp, gentlemanly jeans, men about town will more frequently be opting to wear jeans with their shirt and jackets. This year saw a noticeable increase in the smarter, modern jeans with a twist. In a nut shell, brands are using old manufacturing techniques to create new modern cuts.
Tyler Mallison
In every hip city around the world, ‘pop-up’ shops and galleries have become a nearly ‘permanent’ feature (ironically) in the creative urban landscape. In equal measures, craft studios and limited edition print shops have become the counterbalance to the industrially manufactured mass goods we have come to love and voraciously consume.
The latest entry, spotted last week in London was the Jealous Gallery pop-up print studio at Heal’s— an institution in domestic design. The shop typically oozes good design and has proven itself as a reliable destination for quality furniture of good taste. However, in contrast to its younger sister next door, Habitat, it has at times looked a bit too bourgeois, irrelevant and tired for the young creative professional consumer. This is especially true as a result of the ongoing economic turbulence and consequent reassessment of what defines ‘good value’, which has driven dramatic shifts in trading up and down across categories.
The ‘Jealous Gallery’ interactive pop-up print space has certainly brought a fresh energy to the shop, with the creative activity and buzz of the printers bringing a new life to the shopfront, inviting shoppers in from the cold. The young, contemporary vibe was a pleasing contrast to the somewhat static and posh air typically present in the shop. But what will be the impact after it leaves? The question is how Heal’s will retain this creative energy that it gained from the short-term partnership?
Hayley Burnham
At The Gild, we believe at a very broad-level, that balancing the ideas of ‘art’ and ‘science’ is the secret of brand success.
And for many years, the beauty industry has failed miserably at finding this balance. Historically, beauty-brands have tried to sell the ‘art’ of beauty through romanticised, emotive adverting campaigns that allude to the promise that your looks and your life might be ‘magically’ improved through a new anti-aging cream, a new foundation, or a new mascara. As we’ve talked about in our What Women Want study – women these days are very savvy to these kinds of ‘empty-promises’ that offer little ‘functional’ reason to believe why this would be true.
More recently, beauty brands have tried to counteract this by highlighting and specifying a plethora of scientific ‘miracle’ ingredients that by their very mention—‘prove’ that anti-aging cream will really work (‘it contains ‘micro-glycerine anti-acids, so of course my skin will look ten years younger in a few weeks!’). For years, consumers have been sceptical about how much anti-aging the beauty world can really deliver. More…
Lizzie Carr
Do any of these statements ring true ….
- Do you get impatient when you have to wait inline to buy a sandwich at lunchtime?
- Do you go off and do something else whilst you’re waiting for the kettle to boil?
- Do you friends or partner tell you to slow down when you’re speaking to them?
- Do you finish off people’s sentences?
- Do you think multi-tasking is ‘the best’ thing since sliced bread?
If you’ve nodded your head to a few of these, you might be suffering from ‘Hurry Sickness’. I first heard of this term when I attended a Merlin Lecture held by the Marketing Academy back in January and since then I’ve really tried to reduce my ‘sickness’. More…
At this time of the year, we see and read articles from a variety of agencies with their predictions for 2012. Some are worth the paper they’re written on, others are a bit bland and old hat. So, we thought we’d compile The Gild’s trends and top tips for 2012.
The re-shaping of Asia: looks like a China and India are up to all sorts of fun stuff. China is booming the Art market with leading galleries opening there, such as Gagosian and White Cube. India is becoming the new Dubai, with luxury stores like Hermes and Tod’s. Even Prada created a special collection called Made in India especially for Indian women! So, if you’ve got put your stake in the ground yet, you better hurry …. More…
Tyler Mallison
With the news of this year’s ‘hot’ films and oscar-nominations recently revealed, we are reminded of the beauty of old. The two films with most nominations – Hugo and The Artist – are both love letters to the early days of cinema; and My Week with Marilyn, War Horse and Midnight in Paris have also captured historic moments as well as our imaginations. More…
Tyler Mallison
A new product innovation by Polaroid recently caught my attention: the Polaroid SC1630. It’s essentially a high tech camera or smart phone (enabled by Android) but without the true phone function. While this seems a bit of confusing proposition, at this price point, it does make me think what we could do if we had greater functionality and connectivity in our digital camera devices. And perhaps more interestingly, what the prospect of a smartphone with a new photo experience, powered by the Polaroid brand, could bring if they took it the next level.
Lizzie Carr
According to Simon Kuper in the Financial Times in December, the secret to Sir Alex Ferguson’s success is due to being a great manager. The key to his success is ‘the ability to survive and thrive in a company’. Apparently, he has done this through:
1. Embodying the values of the club’s brand in himself.
2. Building strong relationships with every group within the club.
3. Always looking to the future.
This seems like a set of very straight-forward rules that every good manager should be following. In fact, these are fundamental skills that every person in a consultancy should live by so they build lasting bonds with their client and their client’s brands. There are obviously others, but these are enough to start with.
Lizzie Carr
The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue’s Golden Age by Andrew Cracknell
If you’re interested in the shaping of culture and society over the last 50 years, then ‘The Real Mad Men’ is a book for you to read. Not only does it give a bird’s eye view of the huge changes in the advertising industry from the 1950s onwards, but it also gives you great insight into the shifting mood of consumers within America and their need for consumerisation. It even suggests why we relate to brands in the way we do today.
There are huge similarities in the creative leaders of this advertising revolution as there were in the technological advancement that took place in Silicon Valley during the 1970s. Both were driven by a sense of wanting to change the world and to be different. These visionaries and thinkers took their creative influences from the world of art and used this to help create a vision for the future. They certainly didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and looked to push the boundaries; telling consumers what they wanted, rather than asking them what they needed.
A great read that will inspire you to think creatively, challenging the norms of the corporate mould.