The Vega Brand Challenges
Brand Challenges?
Vega College gets their students to participate in The Brand Challenges, an annual project where students have to create a temporary agency and receive real world briefs and projects from companies and brands. Each brand will be allocated a student agency and these agencies will have to come up with solutions to the brands problems. The briefs can be anything related to marketing, be it running an advertising campaign or doing a total rebrand.
The students have a few weeks to answer the brief and are also required to give feedback, in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, at the end of each week to the brands. At the end of the four weeks, we had to do a final presentation in front of the brands and their management and marketing teams, as well as our lecturers and other invited guests.
We also had to hand in an extensive brand strategy document, explaining our research methods, target markets, insights, and solutions to the brief. This was not only for lecturers to evaluate but also for the brands to take with them and hopefully implement for themselves.
Before being given a brief and a brand to work with, we had to create an agency. All second and third year students were randomly put into groups of about seven or eight and these groups became the various agencies. We had to then create a theme and come up with the branding and visual identity of our agency.
We decided to go with a samurai theme, concentrating on the samurai virtues called bushido. Bushido is loosely analogous to the Western concept of chivalry. It is the moral code concerning samurai attitudes, behaviour and lifestyle. Shinsei on the other hand means rebirth or new birth. We came up with this name because we were a newly created agency that wanted to use the samurai virtues while conducting our work, being polite and honest, but also courageous and bold.
Being the main multimedia designer, I had to do the majority of the work on the logo build and ‘meet the team’ video for our agency presentation.
The Brand: Blue Sky Society
We were given the opportunity to work with the Blue Sky Society, a non-profit organisation that focuses on raising funds and awareness for conservation, humanitarian and environmental projects. They briefed us and made us aware that they needed some help with their marketing and wanted us to promote their campaign called the One in a Million campaign. After much discussion and investigation, we decided to challenge the brief and instead decided to work on the branding of the organisation itself, as apposed to the campaign. We went this route because we felt that the organisations branding could be greatly improved.
Instead of concentrating on the campaign which only lasts a few weeks or months, we decided to give the NGO’s branding a subtle facelift in order to promote trust and confidence in those who view the brand.
Here’s an example of what we came up with:
We were given the opportunity to work with the Blue Sky Society, a non-profit organisation that focuses on raising funds and awareness for conservation, humanitarian and environmental projects. They briefed us and made us aware that they needed some help with their marketing and wanted us to promote their campaign called the One in a Million campaign. After much discussion and investigation, we decided to challenge the brief and instead decided to work on the branding of the organisation itself, as apposed to the campaign. We went this route because we felt that the organisations branding could be greatly improved.
Instead of concentrating on the campaign which only lasts a few weeks or months, we decided to give the NGO’s branding a subtle facelift in order to promote trust and confidence in those who view the brand.
The brands reception
Our final presentation to the brand went well and the brand seemed pleased with our suggestions and advice. In our brand strategy document that we put together for the brand, we fleshed out our suggestions on how to improve the brands visual identity. We made suggestions about changing the logo, updating the website, improving their social media platforms and just giving it all a bit of a work over. We even gave them a flash drive with our proposed logo designs and web design layouts. It seems that Blue Sky Society has taken on our suggestions and has made changes to their logo, using the logo I helped design (keeping their original blue but now adding a more earthly green) and they have also updated their website to how we suggested it should look. This whole experience was very educational and fulfilling, especially after seeing your work and advice being used to help an actual brand.
