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 brainstormed for a while and came up the idea of using the name Pip, a South African slang term for a seed. We chose this theme as we thought it represented who we were and what we would do as an agency.
We were a small agency starting from the ground up, coming up with small ideas that we could nurture and grow and that would then bare fruits for our clients. We decided to go with a lemon pip and our agency mentality was based on the age old saying, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Our agency would take a brand and just make it that much more amazing.
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: Castrol Oil
We were given the opportunity to work with Castrol, a global brand of industrial and automotive lubricants offering a wide range of oils, greases and similar products. They briefed us and made us aware that they needed some help with their marketing and wanted us to come up with ideas to promote their products. They also asked us to come up with three ideas as apposed to the usual one. We weren’t required to execute the ideas this time and were only asked to come up with insights and ideas.
We got busy doing as much research on the brand as possible, uncovering how people felt about the brand and Castrol’s association with BP, with them being BP’s preferred oil brand.
After conducting research, via questionnaires, focus groups and interviews, I put together a short video to summarize the results for our presentations to Castrol.
The brands reception
Our final presentation to the brand went well and Castrol seemed pleased with our suggestions and advice. Through our research, we discovered that the majority South Africans don’t really seem to care about what brand of oil they put in their car. They are also not very familiar with Castrol’s long lasting history.
We decided to show Castrol’s history in racing, both in SA and the world. Castrol used to sponsor a female racer in the 60’s who raced in Durban in South Africa and we decided to use this as an ad idea to create a emotional ad campaign around this theme.
Castrol at the time was also sponsoring the ‘Bloodhound,’ a vehicle that was trying to make an attempt at breaking the land speed record in Hakskeen Pan in SA. We decided that this was also a great inspiration for many ad campaigns.
We also suggested that they get involved with Discovery Insurance’s rewards programme and give points to those who use Castrol Oil at BP service stations, hopefully swaying those customers who use the app to fill up there instead. Castrol enjoyed our presentation and congratulated us on our work.
They liked our various insights and they appreciated our hard work. This whole experience was very educational and fulfilling, especially after seeing your work and advice being used to help an actual brand.