Click here to view the embedded video.

The WilliamsWarn is aimed squarely at what the founders call the ‘beer thinker’ market and it produces commercial quality beer that’s chilled and flows from the tap in just seven days. The company received over 200 offers of distribution from over 50 countries in the first five months and while it was available only in New Zealand initially, the breweries are now being distributed internationally.

“We’re delighted to have been selected by Graphis from the many thousands of entries submitted by agencies internationally,” Studio Alexander managing director Kate Alexander says. “It’s also great that it’s a brand for a truly innovative product, developed by New Zealanders in New Zealand.”

Alexander, who took over as MD from her father in March last year, says it was clear they would be taking an outstanding product to export markets so they wanted a quality of branding and design that would stand up around the world. And, between 2009 and its launch in 2011, Studio Alexander developed naming, positioning, marketing strategy, identity design and graphic system.

The use of the makers’ signatures across collateral shows the personal involvement of the directors/inventors and the WilliamsWarn brand reflects the hand-built, premium feel of the machine with its numbered makers’ plate and stainless steel finish. The ‘W’ shows the coming together of two beer glasses in that ‘cheers’ moment and the circular housing device references beer mats.

A simple and classic colour palette of black and silver references the materials used on the product alongside typography utilising Trade Gothic and applied across stationery, packaging, collateral, website, video and product graphics.

“I was expecting bright colours and a complicated design,” WilliamsWarn director Ian Williams says. “But when I saw the brand work Studio Alexander came up with, I knew immediately it was perfect. It was one of those moments when you know something is right. There was nothing to change and we’ve had a huge amount of very positive feedback.”

Studio Alexander’s WilliamsWarn brand work will feature in Graphis’s 2012 edition of the International Journal of Visual Communication.

New

Old

Tait Electronics was formed by Sir Angus Tait in 1969 in Christchurch and it focused on designing and assembling mobile radios. And while radio remains a core element of the company’s offerings, James Kyd, Tait’s chief marketing officer, says the solutions today include much more than just radios, which is why it made the decision to change the name from Tait Radio Communications to Tait Communications.

“This signals the beginning of a very exciting time for Tait and our global customers,” says Kyd. “The new identity represents an ongoing business transformation that we have been involved in for the past two years, and better reflects the business we are now in and the ways we are delivering value to our customers around the world…Today, our customers turn to us for the complete communications system, sourced, deployed, supported and managed in a fully integrated way.”

In 2011, Tait’s revenue exceeded US$150 million, of which 95 percent was earned in the 150 countries it exports to (recent successes include cutting a deal with the emergency services in New South Wales and ongoing work with the London bus network after securing a $19 million contract to install a communications system a couple of years back) and the company has seen record revenues and profits in the last three years, perhaps partly because it invests more than 14 percent of its revenue in R&D.

“The new identity captures the very essence of Tait’s culture—our customers—who at the heart of everything we do as a company,” Kyd says. “Our customers’ needs drive every decision, and this is reflected in Tait’s new brand statement: ‘Devoted to your cause’.”

Company spokesman James Richardson says the internal and external rollouts of the new brand, which was almost a year in the making, have been hugely successful so far and there’s been lots of positive feedback about it.

The new brand will continue to be rolled out gradually so that all the other aspects of the business align with the new visual identity.

The company was recently launched by creator James Oliver, who says it took five years to get to this point, and the inspiration for its playful, almost Ben & Jerry’s-esque branding spawned from simply tossing ideas around about the group’s feelings towards ice cream. Resident copywriter and business manager Tony Reardon says they were lucky, because Holy Moly handed over complete creative control and, as an added bonus, allowed them to create a couple of flavours.

“We understand retail and the consumer so we needed to create something that worked for the product, consumers and was different yet had the legs to grow and build,” says Reardon. ”We had a number of other ideas, as you do, but this was the strongest and most flexible. And it’s fun.”

2010 was a busy year for the company, which was behind the 2010 re-launch of Eden Park, designing everything from the park’s sign to its sandwich wrappers.

It also developed the branding for Partners Life, an insurance company, and managed everything from the corporate vision to claim forms.

Lemonade has been in partnership with Burger Fuel’s marketing team over the last 14 years, managing the chain’s branding. Its recent work for the company ranged from creating POS menus for their Middle East stores and editing the BurgerVision in-store video loop.

New ventures for Lemonade include working with The Turkish Bread Company to tweak its packaging and market positioning, achieved by poking fun at the company’s roots with a bunch of tongue-in-cheek sayings.

The company is made up of six staff, including lead designer and owner Andrea Fowler.

• This story originally appeared on idealog.co.nz

As part of a campaign developed by Mango, between January 2-13 More FM listeners were encouraged to enter online and nominate a town or tourist attraction they wanted radio host Clarke Gayford and the Pascall team to visit during their two-week road trip in a pair of branded Britz campervans (all entrants went in the draw to win their own road trip in a Britz campervan, as well as $5000 cash, and the prize will be drawn after the tour finishes on Jan 30).

Gayford is broadcasting his drive show each night from one of the campervans and, in typical PR style, the road trip is getting a good, regular airing on the station, with trailers, mentions and ad libs.

During many of the adventures, which are all being filmed by a videographer and posted on the More FM website and Pascall Facebook page, a local resident has the chance to be Gayford’s adventure buddy by entering regional text-in-to-win competitions. And, as you’d expect, lots of free Pascall treats are being handed out along the way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Social media is becoming an increasingly important channel for FMCG brands (especially if you’re trying to attract the ‘bored mother’ demographic), and the promotion also aims to build up the Facebook fanbase. And, after soft launching its page two weeks before the promotion kicked off, it has added over 6000 fans in one week through tactical ad placement (including ads on Facebook), on-air promotion and Facebook updates showing the itinerary and sampling details for each location, plus an update of every adventure.

Pascall brand manager Will Radford says the key objectives behind the campaign are to promote Pascall as New Zealand’s favourite lollies, link the brand with the fun of going on a road trip with family and friends over the summer (and promote the classic Pascall varieties like Pineapple Lumps, Jetplanes and Milk Bottles as the ones to be eaten on the way) and ultimately increase sales.

“I guess the key out-take is that we are integrating our comms from above with radio and outdoor through to instore, resulting in increased sales and improvements in our instore brand health metrics.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper FMCG campaign without some instore action, and it currently has five Road Trip-themed promotions created by Apollo Promotions happening across Countdown, New World, The Warehouse, Shell and BP (another Britz camper holiday is being offered in Countdown supermarkets nationwide).

Click here to view the embedded video.

VendHQ’s Nick Houldsworth says it was a challenging but enjoyable brief and, rather just film a few developers with pale skin and bad posture taking to an old cash register with baseball bats, he says they wanted to have a bit of fun with it and tell the story of why the company is “determined to put an end to miserable pieces of s**t like Steve, and all his kind”.

The promo was filmed on a shoestring budget, with favours called in from some talented friends, like writer and director Gerard Johnstone from the Jacquie Brown Diaries and Dan Musgrove from Underbelly in the lead.

Who knew point of sale could be so entertaining?

Click here to view the embedded video.

In what is a nice little commercial circle jerk with Hasbro, users get to delve into the mystery of Rico’s death and relive those old Cluedo memories at www.byebyerico.com, the first ever online game Hasbro has done. And it’s not just a YouTube gimmick. It’s a very big digital build that is reported to have taken .99, which is currently thought to be fighting for the account with DraftFCB, Saatchi & Saatchi and Special Group, around three months to complete.

Air New Zealand’s ex-head of marketing Jules Lloyd, was pretty proud of Rico when she left. And head of international marketing Jodi Williams also paid tribute to him for achieving his intended goals, particularly overseas.

“Rico’s core purpose over the past year has been to draw global attention to our revolutionary new economy Skycouch and premium economy Spaceseat. As a small airline at the bottom of the world we haven’t had the budgets to take a traditional marketing approach to gain awareness of these award-winning product innovations. Thanks to Rico they have had fantastic exposure in our core international markets and beyond. Rico’s risqué approach and online videos resulted in his quick rise to fame over the past year, with more than 4.5 million people watching his videos on YouTube and the Chinese equivalent Yoku, plus hundreds of millions more learning about him through the global media coverage he’s garnered in the likes of the New York Times, Daily Mail UK, Huffington Post, the Examiner, Forbes.com, E! News, OK!, Life and Style, Star, Perez Hilton, and US celebrity news website TMZ.”

She says killing Rico off was never in the long-term plan but they wanted to farewell him in a “uniquely entertaining and light-hearted Air New Zealand way.” She says other companies often let their mascots drift away, so this is a way to keep a few candles burning for Rico and honour his many fans.

As for the detractors who thought his behaviour was unsuitable for a brand like Air New Zealand, she says reputable brands like the Jim Henson Company and Hasbro were happy to get involved, as were a whole host of celebrities, so that’s enough of an indication for her that he’s been well-received. Rico was also an online play, so, rather than spraying everyone with something a la the broadcast model, social media allows users to opt-in.

Rico’s success was cited by judges as one of the reasons Air New Zealand won the 2011 Airline Business marketing strategy award, saying “Air New Zealand is game changing” and that the airline was in an “industry leading position – pushing the outer edge”.

Rico leaves behind a Facebook fan base of more than 47,000 followers, 80 percent of whom are from New Zealand (which is a moderately interesting stat given he was supposedly aimed at foreigners). And whether you liked him or not, full credit to the puppet masters and whoever it was doing all the talking, because there were a few moments of goodness and entertaining Borat-esque, language mangling humour along the way, like the interview with Jacquie Brown.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Air New Zealand hasn’t shied away from weirdness with a follow-up mascot either, with Mason and Jason, the conjoined sheep twins created by its international agency Albion, being set free recently.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But we’re picking Mark Sainsbury’s muppet as a replacement.

Richard Robinson/NZ Herald

• Download the letter here AK24B44-QuickConnect-11302011-120740

“We are sure the more than 300 brewers in Germany currently using the term radler would take issue with the stance from Monteith’s if they were ever to export their brews,” says Boundary Road general marketing manager Adam Maxwell.

Maxwell says Boundary Road has no interest in engaging in a drawn out legal battle with Monteith’s.

“The Boundary Road Brewery craft range launched in August is already off to a flying start and I am happy to leave it up to consumers to make their preference known.”

But in an effort to slow the flow of legal letters it is now referring to the beer as being ‘in the style known internationally as a radler’. It’s almost as good as ‘Formerly the Blackball Hilton‘.

DB’s spokeswoman Jo Jalfon was unable to be contacted.

This trademark stoush follows on from a spate of them this year, after Fonterra tried to trademark the term vintage and Moa sent a rather entertaining postcard back to France after being told to stop using the term champagne on its website.

The results of the CMO study were presented at a breakfast before last week’s Marketing Today conference and there were some interesting results from the 54 CMOs interviewed in New Zealand that differed from the global findings.

For one, there’s a lack of marketing and IT alignment in New Zealand compared to global rates. And strangely, given the pressure on marketing budgets, the need to prove ROI, the desire for marketers to be taken seriously in the boardroom and the impact of technology on the marketing playing field, when asked what they needed to worry about to achieve personal success, Kiwi marketers didn’t feel they needed to worry about tech savviness, social media or finance skills (creative thinking topped the list for both chief executives and CMOs).

The global survey of 1734 chief marketing officers showed more than two-thirds saw a need to change the mix of skills within the marketing function to enhance analytic capabilities, invest in new tools and technologies and develop new strategies for managing big data.

With market and technology factors driving rapid change, the four areas they saw as game changers were social media, the data explosion, proliferation of channels and devices and shifting consumer demographics.

Few CMOs were exploiting the full power of the digital grapevine, with only a quarter tracking blogs, and less than half monitoring third-party reviews and consumer reviews.

While CMOs generally believed they were underprepared to take charge of the growing volume and variety of data, social networks can provide a rich source of information about customer sentiment with context that can help companies predict demand patterns.

Four out of five respondents anticipate high levels of complexity over the next five years but only half feel ready to take on the challenge.

Worryingly, despite the number of ways in which customers’ privacy can be compromised today, only 28 percent considered it necessary to take a second look at their privacy policies.

Given that privacy concerns are a huge issue for users, the study pointed out that CMOs might want to think about how they could inspire greater customer confidence as they consider the management of big data for their own purposes.

Most said proving the value of the marketing department to others was a hurdle and cited ROI as the primary measure of their effectiveness. But CMOs are struggling with providing hard numbers and plan to look outside of their companies for analytics.

Generally, while respondents said they had strong influence over promotional activities, they were lacking in the other three Ps of marketing—product, price and placement.

• Check out the tweet stream here.

Billed as New Zealand’s largest marketing event, the all-day conference, which returned after a few years’ hiatus, was well attended by business leaders and senior executives and featured a stellar panel of speakers, including international guests.

The morning kicked off with IBM NZ discussing the results of its first CMO Global Marketing Study with a few invited guests over breakfast. And there were plenty of the highlights throughout the day.

Stephen Smith, general manager of digital, Maori Television and MC for the event, spoke about how serendipity would be taken away from content marketing as algorithms became smarter and grew more personalised.

Debra Hall, chair of the Marketing Association and long-time researcher, spoke about how new media is the biggest news, the media explosion in China, the importance of staying on brand, the proliferation of mobile apps and smart devices and the fast-diminishing art of handwriting.

Eric Morse, director of direct-to-consumer marketing operations at Warner Music Group (guest speaker from NYC) spoke about the growth of the web and how it allows marketers to target individuals, rather than markets. And he did so without dropping big music names (except Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton).

Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came in live from Boston via videolink to share some brilliant and radical thoughts on the future of marketing, such as the role of citizen media, collective intelligence, power of pull and agile leadership.

Paul Thompson, group executive editor, Fairfax Media addressed the global challenges facing print and publishing, the role of content, the power of audiences and the interaction between the two—and the need for high quality journalism.

Stefan Lecchi, head of telecommuncations, Samsung NZ, gave an interesting talk on the Korean giant’s leadership areas, how it operates in global markets, its approach to consumers and key areas marketers should focus on.

Russell Browne, marketing manager, DB Breweries, rounded off the conference with a fantastic talk on the power of story-telling, citing how the brewery not just engaged audiences but increased sales for DB Export through stories well told—and smartly sold.

A panel featuring heavy-hitters from the local circuit (Paul Maher, TVNZ; Mark Jackson, NZ Post; Ande Macpherson, Mediaworks Radio; and Lynda Hallinan, NZ Gardener) fielded a variety of questions on media and marketing from the audience during the Q&A session (and Hallinan got Eric Morse’s endorsement as the best speaker of the day).

After a day of much tweeting and smart talking, attendees were invited to mingle over a jingle – with a live DJ in accompaniment — and share some marketing wisdom, as they fittingly brought an end to a conference about the ‘liquid consumers’ by sipping on a chilled one.