Case Studies

Click here to download this case study as a Word document

Elmwood

Elmwood – who are we?
Elmwood is an independent branding and design consultancy based in Guiseley, Leeds. We’ve been around for 16 years and now employ 60 people in the UK and Australia.

Of the 64 full-time staff, 80% are chargeable people (that means they can charge out their services to clients) so the company has very few administrators. We sometimes use freelancers such as designers, writers and visualisers. We’ve built up a small roster of people we know and trust that we can call on.

Originally we focussed on design work, but six years ago we repositioned to offer a full brand consultancy service, and at the same time opened an office in London. We give strategic advice to clients about their communications and use graphic design to implement their strategies, for example by developing new packaging formats or helping them to launch new products.

We opened the London office because that’s where a lot of company head offices are located and we needed a base there so we could respond to the needs of our clients. On the back of our success in London we gained clients in Scotland and opened an office in Edinburgh, too. The same principle applied when we moved into Melbourne, Australia. An ex-client of ours became the Managing Director of Coles Myer, the biggest retailer in Australia. Two years ago he told us about the great business opportunities out there because Australia is 15 years behind the UK and the US in terms of brand development. We won the contract and opened an office to service our client.

What sort of businesses do you work with?
We work in many different sectors: for example: finance, retail, business-to-business and professional services. Our clients range from the property division of ASDA to the Football Association, from the BBC to a small food business called Debbie and Andrews Sausages.

Elmwood has grown in size since we decided to offer both brand consultancy and design. We like working with clients that are prepared to challenge the status quo and want something a little different.

How does the company find its clients?
We generate work in a lot of different ways – we respond to tenders and are sometimes approached by potential clients who’ve seen our work. We’ve got an active business development programme that promotes our reputation, so that people are aware of the company. We do ‘heads up’ marketing, where a team goes out to clients and gives Elmwood’s view of their business. Before we visit them we carry out research and ask questions. What sector are they in? What are they good at? Where are they being squeezed? What might happen in the future? How can we help them fill some gaps? We’d never go to a potential client and say, ‘We’re Elmwood, we’re a branding and design consultancy. Have you got any work for us?’ Our approach is: ‘We’re Elmwood, we’re a branding and design consultancy, and we’ve looked at your business. Obviously you know your business better than we do, but from an objective and creative viewpoint we think there are some things we could do to help you’.

Our account managers and designers have excellent listening skills. You can listen to what people tell you but you have to be able to hear what they need – and that takes practice. You also need empathy and to know what you’re talking about. You have to know about their business sector and be confident that you can go in to the marketing directors and talk sensibly about their business and what you can do for them.

So you have a new client – how do you determine what they need?
First of all it’s essential to identify the client’s unique selling point (USP) and find out what makes them tick. That can mean asking some very penetrating questions. We sometimes go to clients and they say something like, ‘I want to stretch my brand through from tomato sauce through to soup.’ We ask them why they want to do that – and we may challenge their answer. Why move into soup if it’s already been done? What’s different about your product?

We believe that what differentiates us from other agencies in the branding and design sector is the principle of Authentic Attitude.

What’s Authentic Attitude?
Elmwood creates brands with Authentic Attitude. We have to be truthful – we won’t make things up about a business. But we have to get to the heart of it to learn what makes each of our clients unique. Only one brand can be the cheapest, everyone else has to provide something different and it’s the difference that we always try to find.

We’re not looking for faint-hearted client or clients who want to maintain the status quo. We’re always seeking out real challenges within a particular business sector.

Can you give us an example?
Envirotech is a waste management company. It’s a competitive business, operating in a competitive sector where price is really important. Elmwood had to find a way to differentiate Envirotech from its competitors. In that climate the only way to differentiate one waste management company from another was through a different product or by finding something in the business that was unique. We wanted to find out what made this business tick. The Managing Director said that the business was really about environmental responsibility. New European Union rules say that anyone caught disposing of waste illegally will be fined £20,000 and the client described this as ‘serious shit’. We thought that was a great name to describe exactly what the company did and show that it took its responsibilities very seriously. In Elmwood’s terms, this is the part of the company that is authentic. So how could Envirotech communicate to its customers that it was serious about its business? We developed a new identity – Serious** that shows both the essence of the business and a sense of humour. The MD is a very witty, larger than life character – but he’s also very serious about his work so he’s a good publicist. He kitted out his staff with hard hats and overalls, things that you’d assume go with the job but actually don’t. He does things properly but he does it with a bit of wit. If you visit our website on www.elmwood.co.uk you’ll find a number of client case studies, including Envirotech, that illustrate how we’ve put our technique into action.

How do you get to the heart of a new client?
After an initial meeting, our team carries out a lot of research. For instance, if the client is a department store with outlets all over the country, we’ll visit stores in Leeds, London, Birmingham and Glasgow to see if the reality of the business matches what the client thinks is happening. If the client paints a picture of a fantastic business but that’s not what the team sees, we’ll examine the existing situation and consider how the company can progress to get to get from where it is now to where it wants to be.

Our team does a lot of shopping and regularly carries out audits of what’s in the shops. We’ve developed a tool called Streets Ahead where we can take a picture of a moment in time in Oxford Street and use it to spot trends. Clients like this and it gives our research added credibility.

We also carry out desk research and use lots of secondary sources, and feedback from staff. We work with trends forecasters like Futurelab; we share information on their projects and in return they share information about what the next big thing is going to be. This helps us when we go back to a client, because we can often discuss trends that they haven’t even thought about.

What happens after you’ve discussed the client’s needs and done your research?
An account director, a writer, and a creative or design director finalise the brief so that both the client and Elmwood are absolutely clear about what we’re going to achieve. Finalising a brief can take a few days, several weeks or months. We also have to agree a budget and that can cause tension if people want a particular type of work carried out but don’t have an appropriate budget. We try to accommodate them as much as we can, but we never over promise and under deliver.

Different teams work together on different projects but they always include a senior account handler, a writer and a senior creative. Creativity has to be channelled to meet the client’s aims. If we don’t produce a change in perception, an increase in sales, an increase in market share or whatever the objective was, we won’t do our job and we won’t make a living.

How do you encourage your creatives?
It’s very important that our staff are inspired so everyone is encouraged to go out of the business four times a year to do something that they really enjoy. They’re given a ‘ticket to ride’ – the company pays a train or plane train fare to anywhere in the UK and they can do whatever they like: meditation, taking photos in Blackpool, visiting galleries. We encourage them to share their experiences, particularly when they see great design ideas or images. Recently we encouraged our people to visit the Saatchi exhibition of abstract art at the Leeds City Art Gallery. It didn’t relate to a particular client but it might prove a source of inspiration and recharge their batteries. We encourage an attitude where your job is part of your life and reflects your interests.

What happens once the brief is finalised?
The next question is ‘how do we execute it?’ At this stage another designer and writer might get involved and the whole team is briefed on what’s required, the time frame and budgets. Projects usually break down into definite stages:

• the strategy
• the conceptual stage, which includes illustration style and writing outlines
• presentation to the client
• developmental stage
• production.

We charge on an hourly rate so to keep within budget, people have to work within their allotted hours. There is some flexibility. The account director, project manager and creatives allocate the budget and they determine which stage requires more or less of the money. It doesn’t always work out; sometimes clients that we really want to work with just don’t have the money for everything we want to deliver so we’ll allow ourselves to go a third over budget. Our work’s not just about money, it’s about creative potential. We look for projects that designers and writers can throw themselves into. It’s really important to provide variety in their work, so they don’t get bored.

Often before we give clients a visual presentation of our designs, we’ll show them what we’ve seen in their business sector, what other people are doing, what could be the next big thing. This might take the form of pictures, a short film or vox pop street interviews. This approach helps to build an argument and brings credibility to our work

How do your creatives generate ideas?
All the creative team are involved throughout the duration of a project. They may have ten different ideas for a business so we have to analyse each one and see if it meets the brief. Sometimes it comes down to ticking boxes to make sure we’ve covered everything we wanted to but sometimes you use your intuition. We ask a lot of questions: Are we meeting the brief? Which ideas do we like the best? Which idea is the most differentiated in the market? Is it credible? Will it win an award? If we can’t come to a decision collectively about which three ideas to take to the client, then the creative director will make the selection.

With a client that we don’t know particularly well, we’ll give them a selection of ideas: something that hits the brief; something that takes them forward a bit, and something that moves along a lot. From their reaction we’ll gauge what they want. You have to be able to manage input from client skilfully, so we never send a designer or an account handler on their own to a meeting. We always travel in packs.

Do you have a monitoring and evaluation process?
We have a scorecard system that measures things like:

• Was the project delivered on time?
• Was it on budget?
• Did it do what it was supposed to do in the brief – did it increase sales, did it increase market share or change perception?

We hold both post-project review sessions and client review sessions. We ask: Did the client behave properly? Did they provide everything that was needed when we asked? Did they engage in conversations about big ideas?

We use client satisfaction surveys. If we’ve worked with a client for a long time and we haven’t asked them recently what they think about the service, we’ll ask them to fill out the survey on line. It’s anonymous and gives them the chance to evaluate our performance. That, in turn, helps us to improve.

Which programs/applications do you use?
We use Illustrator, Quark, Indesign, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Other key programmes on our systems are Flash, HTML and PowerPoint.

Do you produce plans and working drawings?
We don’t produce story boards like an ad agency but we map out a presentation plan that includes the key messages and how we’re going to get these across. We’ll write skeleton copy and headlines, and present these to the client to show the structure of the document/packaging/website etc, how it’s going to work, and why it will appeal to their stakeholders. When the client is happy with these preliminaries, we develop ideas further and at the next session we present two or three visual approaches, colour ways and photographic styles.

Our visualisers sketch out ideas but we also use technology. When everyone was producing Mac visuals we banned people from going anywhere near Macs for the first stage of a project because everyone was being constrained by what they could do on a Mac rather than developing good ideas. We asked them to get their pencils out and start doodling!

Technology is like an instrument. You have to be able to master a piano keyboard technically and learn the notes of a piece of music, then you learn to make the piano sing. It’s the same with Macs. We’re constantly updating our systems. People here need to know exactly what they can get out of Illustrator and similar systems.

We use visualisers because not all designers can draw. They may have excellent creative ideas but they can’t put them on paper so we get in someone who can. If we had to choose between employing a designer who is an excellent ideas person or someone who is technically brilliant, we’d go for the ideas person every time because those people are few and far between.

How do you present your ideas to the client?
We have to decide whether presentation is going to be formal or informal. We sometimes make a paper presentation where we ask clients to come to our meeting rooms, which have magnetic boards on which we can display the creative work, and take them through the process.

For more formal presentations we create a digital presentation and project it, but if it’s a one-to-one meeting we’d use laptops on the desk. Recently we’ve been using Muji folders for presentations. With these we can write a story showing why we’ve developed certain ideas and annotate the pages. The client can take the presentation back to their colleagues and they don’t have to remember anything because it’s all been written down for them.

Top

 

Case Studies

Extras for this case study