Blog

We’ve just joined Witney & District Chamber of Trade & Commerce and are looking forward to meeting more businesses from the town.

The Chamber offers all kinds of advice on issues like planning, traffic, import/export information and even sourcing translators. It draws its members from across Witney’s industrial, commercial, retail and professional businesses.

“An obvious beginning perhaps but one that seems rarely adhered to. Ad ideas come in many forms: they can be funny, the can be poignant, they can provide something useful to audiences or they can be pure fun. But to get people to love them, they have to be great”.
Creative Review March 2012 article ‘How to make great ads’

Give on the mobile

If you have a mobile phone or a Blackberry here is a really easy way you can make donations to help children like …. Or people like Bill.

Instead of sending cheques or credit card donations you can make a donation completely securely by using your giveonthemobile app.

New year, new opportunities – and many companies are now thinking about their marketing activities for 2012. Sometimes, at this time of year, we receive calls from companies enquiring about creating a one-off tactical piece of literature that will promote a new product or service.

Whilst this request might prove to be a good route to market for a particular product or service, we would like you to consider the many ways your business and services could and should go to market. Organisations need to look as a whole brand and create a strategic marketing plan that will deliver the desired results.

One Hat Design offer a free, no obligation, one hour Strategic Brainstorming Session to take place during January 2012.

This confidential session will help you to understand your market potential, to plan how to approach your market strategically, and then to devise some cost-effective tactics to achieve the agreed strategy. Additionally, you will know how to measure the success of each element of the plan to ensure your marketing activity achieves the desired and clearly defined results.

We only have 5 free Strategic Brainstorming Sessions slots available in January 2012, so email enquiries@onehatdesign.com as soon as possible and we’ll book you in.

Guideposts provides direct services in the community for people with, or recovering from, mental health issues, Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia. They also help people with learning disabilities and children with special needs.

One Hat Design was invited to help with their marketing, the start of this was to develop a new brand and corporate identity. We have just launched their new corporate guidelines and are we are now focussing on marketing campaigns designed to raise awareness about Guideposts fundraising activities and services.

Like many organisations looking to add value, Guideposts has grown organically over time and added many useful new services to their portfolio. Whilst this is beneficial to the community, often the brand and positioning of an organisation can be lost beneath a myriad of different offerings, solutions and services.

One of the major tasks for One Hat Design was to reposition the many services that Guideposts offers into a more coherent narrative with brands and sub-brands fitting together in a more organised and consistent fashion. This exercise will make it far easier for the general public to identify with Guideposts and engage with their core messages.

“We really liked One Hat Design’s approach,”said Louise Longson, “They are not just great and original designers, but they worked together with us to understand the organisation and our needs fully before helping us reaffirm our identity”.

If your organisation could benefit from increased clarity of presentation, call Steve on +44 (0)1993 702075 and make sure your brand is communicating clearly with your customers.

We have recently worked with Phoenix Temple Wealth Management Ltd, Independent Financial Advisors, based in Oxfordshire, to help them ensure they have consistent brand image across all of their social media.

This project gave us a bright idea!

Most organisations are now using a combination of their website, email, Twitter, Facebook, and maybe YouTube, Google Plus and two of three more of the many new social media products out there. Because social media is new and largely “free”, many companies have thrown themselves into it to see how it works.

This approach comes with hidden problems. Companies will have spent time and money carefully investing in their brand with their website and printed leaflets beautifully produced to create the right impact in the marketplace. Putting something together quickly just so you can use Twitter or FaceBook will undermine and damage your brand.

Therefore, we have come up with a Design Package to brand all of your email and social media elements together. This will ensure that you use “joined up” marketing to present a consistent brand in ALL your communications.

Whether you use Hootsuite, WordPress, Mailchimp, or LinkedIn or even have no idea what we are talking about, social media is here to stay and you could benefit from our help!

As your market becomes more competitive, great branding is not a luxury but is an essential investment that will help you win more business.

To avoid the stilted conversation above, we have come up with a checklist of items to consider when talking to a brand consultant and designer.

1. Itemise your sales collateral: – e.g. brochure, website, business cards etc
2. Message: What is the major point you are trying to make? i.e. our product saves you 50% of your heating bills
3. Market Place: Who are your prospects – industry, job title, profile etc?
4. Competition: Who are your competitors in this market?
5. Positioning Statement: Who you are, what you do, your USP, why should I care – what’s in it for me etc?
6. Deadline: e.g. We need this for an exhibition in two months time.

So now you know how to brief a brand consultant, email Steve and his team at enquiries@onehatdesign.com and start the journey towards winning more business.

Marketing messages need to be consise and clear, but actually this is a skill that is useful in all walks of life!

Sometimes we all need a wry remark for that all-important speech, or a pithy putdown for that caustic colleague but many of us think of that perfect reposte three hours later, which frankly, is too late!

So, this month, we have a fabulous prize of “More Brit Wit” – from Jane Austen to Billy Connolly and Geoffrey Chaucer to Tracey Emin, the art of the epigram is a useful skill that can elevate your verbal repartee to a whole new level.

To win your copy, simply answer the following question:

“Name the national treasure who has written ‘The Liar’ and ‘The Hippopotamus’ and many other works?”

Email your answer and contact details to us at: enquiries@onehatdesign.com and we’ll choose the winner on Monday 14th November.

When creating the right design solution for your marketing needs, each clearly defined stage becomes an important milestone in bringing your new product or service to the market.

Design projects tend to follow these four steps:

1. discover – forming your ideas, having identified the need for a new product or service
2. define – refining ideas, establishing the business objectives of creating this new product, ongoing management of the design project
3. develop – creating a prototype of your new product and testing it in order to see if it performs as it is designed to do
4. deliver – producing and launching the product or service

Dividing the design process up in this way can help you to develop and plan the timetable for your new project.

Although our workflow can handle a variety of file types we prefer artwork to be supplied as print-ready PDFs. When supplying PDF files it’s important that they are set to our preferred specifications. A general overview is set out below:
•    All artwork must be composite CMYK
•    Any spot colours to be printed must be included within the file
•    All images must be a minimum of 300dpi
•    All fonts must be embedded or converted to outline
•    All files must contain crop marks
•    All files must have 3mm of bleed where required
If supplying native files a general rule is to collect or package all associated files (fonts/graphics/images) used in your page layout as they will be needed to successfully output the file. If you are unsure of any of these settings or require a more detailed explanation please call for assistance. We accept files from many applications but please call to discuss your requirements and we can then help with your file delivery.