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 We are DarkRed Consulting | brand & business strategists.
We design brands. We create brand love.
“Your brand encapsulates the role you play in the world, and it acts as a guide to business decisions. A strong brand can help you get funding, increase profit margins, manage crisis, build a community, and create a focused vision for the future.”
Create brand love is a better approach to brand and business. Before you spend big on identity, communications and media - stop and ask yourself,
“Is your brand and business fit for the consumer of today?”
Brand love is the next evolution of brand advocacy and brand awareness. We give you the strategies you need to market your business effectively to the new breed of constantly evolving consumers.
Our brand UX review checks the health of your brand, and forms the basis of your own bespoke brand health check. To us, brand love is a measure of how you feel about the products, services and marketing of any business you encounter in your daily life. To create brand love, you must look after your brand character and brand story.
· brand character - which is central to how people feel about your business, both from the inside
and the outside.
· brand story - which gives your brand the depth it needs to fully inform your future purpose
and marketing.
Now, technology has enabled brands to exist in more of your daily life than ever before. The traditional narrow approach will not suffice, our services provide holistic opportunities previously unavailable.
Look after your brand character and brand story.
Create brand love.
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 It is clear that technology and the internet has fundamentally changed our lives and how we behave as consumers. The result of this is the rise of what we call the evolving consumer.
We constantly study the evolving consumer, and then apply what we learn to your brand identity, communications, media & user experience. We consistently find innovative opportunities in all areas of your business through the application of our services.
“Innovation is an art which can be practised and is repeatable. Inspiration is fleeting and largely unpredictable. We do not rely on inspiration, we practise innovation.”
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 1. brand UX review
This is the foundation of our service to you.
"Our brand UX review reveals strategic opportunities for your brand, covering effectiveness, reach and clarity. By taking all this into account, we check if your brand message is really integrated, and highlight where it could, and should, be substantially improved."
We profile and review your current brand UX message across all media and provide insight and guidance on how to make it more effective in-line with your needs. With the information learnt, we discover opportunities and solutions to help re-define and improve your message within a concept strategy. These opportunities encompass how your audience views your message, and what your brand UX relationship means to them.
Within our brand UX review you will receive initial thoughts, insights and opportunities to allow you to build and improve your own brand character and brand story. From large multi-nationals to small local businesses, our brand UX review provides valuable talking points to create brand love.
We use our brand UX review to give you the brand identity, communications and media to fully realise the potential of your company. We also provide a concept strategy outlining how you can take advantage of new technologies alongside traditional media to improve your return on investment within the marketplace.
2. create
Here we use insights gained from the concept strategy to generate multiple ideas across all target media. We create designs which present an aesthetic coherent story, and repeatedly ensure these measure up to your target consumers. With this achieved, we ensure all ideas and designs are correctly translated into a compelling experience.
3. build
The build stage realises the design into a reliable, useable and successful site or campaign. If you have your own technical staff we can work with them to ensure the smooth translation from design to build, or if not we can help provide this for you.
We can provide our services to you as a whole or stage by stage. You can use our brand UX review to help start a conversation, then move onto the create and build stage when you are ready to proceed.
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 rand is no longer just a logo, stationary or a set of brand guidelines. It is a mood, a feeling, a philosophy, a string of descriptive words, and an impression that lives in peoples subconscious.
What's in a Brand?
If you mention a major brand such as ‘Apple’, 'Google' or ‘Microsoft’, you immediately have your own impression of these brands - good or bad. If a brand has done its job well, then it's a good impression and people will start to love and talk about it. In effect, the brand creates its own marketing. In this technological, digital age this is more important than ever.
What's different?
Today, marketing is moving past the visually creative and into the scientifically creative. Marketing to the modern consumer takes an in-depth understanding of the technologies available, and the people who use them. To develop truly creative solutions that engage people and lead them to love a brand, sciences such as neuroscience, behavioural analysis, psychology, computing, informational analysis, and business analysis need to be studied, appreciated and incorporated.
Our Approach
We already incorporate these sciences into our approach. We use them to create brand love for our clients by developing the brand story and brand character present in all businesses and their advertising. We encapsulate our approach in one succinct message:
Look after your brand character and brand story. Create brand love.
Contact us now for your own brand health check. Together we can explore all your business, brand and marketing opportunities. |
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 Owen
Hailing from Dublin, Ireland - Owen experienced early on how product design and emerging technologies are changing the way we live. During his time at Broadcom Ireland, he was part of the team which designed innovative interfaces, infrastructure and services for the inception of the internet in Europe. Moving to London in the late 90's he worked at agencies including Dare Digital and Saatchi & Saatchi, designing and developing award winning campaign websites for Sony Ericsson and VISA. He was head-hunted (along with Nick) to setup and build the digital department at the newly re-branded Dentsu London. With his long interest in brand identity, print and digital, he formed DarkRed Consulting with Nick to develop new and innovative ways to sell your company's brand and products to consumers.
 Nick
Nick has been involved in emerging technologies and creative innovation since the early 90's. His experience spans software architecture in the City of London, through to development at web design agencies at the height of the DotCom boom. His role at IDEO (the internationally renowned design innovation agency) involved bringing his knowledge of technology processes to bear on the ever increasing digitisation of consumer products and services. Partnering with Owen to form a pitch-winning strategic brand and creative team for the advertising industry, their subsequent formation of DarkRed Consulting enables him to continue his fascination with how people view and interact with the modern digital world.
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| | | | is the creative industry putting digital in a box? |
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 ello, how do you digital?
It’s clear that we live in a world filled with technology. Indeed, the relatively recent effect of technology on communications has had a particularly profound effect, so much so that the way in which we perceive our world has changed us forever.
The creative industry must, of course, adapt to this effect. However, our experience of working in the creative industry has revealed what we can best describe as the ‘another link in the chain’ approach. This reveals itself in the identification of certain staff with an interest or aptitude for technology as ‘digital’, and the rest as ‘not digital’.
However, we see this labelling as both misleading and illogical. From a societal standpoint, we observe in this context, that it is not technology which is digital, it is ourselves. Our perception of the world through technology; its effect on how we navigate our environment, how we interact with our friends, colleagues and strangers, and how we consume and expect information in an instant, is common to all of us and has a name. It’s called digital.
Digital is a verb. It’s an evolutionary activity. Everyday acts require us to digital. Our message to our clients is “We digital, you digital too”.
We see ‘digital specialists’ as ‘behavioural specialists’. We describe this as a constant fascination with observing how people navigate their way through a technology enabled world. These people are not some people, they are all people.
We believe the industry needs to understand how, why and where we digital, not just what we digital.
Digital is how we do things, it cannot be put in a box. |
| | | | playtime is over for the internet |
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 ay you are using the internet, it’s a familiar scene. But we’d like to ask you… ‘How do you feel?’ Does that sound like an odd question? We think not. We think the internet should be experienced like you would experience a good film. We like the internet, but so often it falls short of expectations.
People’s contact with the internet is growing every day, but is the depth and relevance of their experience growing at the same rate? And when they use the internet, is it clear what they are interacting with?
From our experience, confusion comes from the use of the term ‘internet’. Originally the concept of the internet was to share knowledge and connect people. It has now become a ‘catch-all’ for a collection of information which is delivered through websites, microsites, banners and so on.
The concept is lost.
digital - a case of mistaken identity
Adding to the confusion is the more recent term ‘digital’. This is often used in the same breath as ‘internet’, with their meanings often interchanged. This is at best a simplification, and at worst an under-estimation. To us, digital is not a term, it is the new concept.
We understand digital to be the point at which people and technology touch. This affects all of us, and we affect each other through our use of it. As the internet was born from the concept of sharing knowledge, digital is born from understanding what people do, how they think and how their experiences make them feel.
Our approach to the digital concept is to explore what technology means to people, from how we learn to how we’re entertained, from how we connect to how these experiences make us feel.
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| | | | look, don’t see. listen, don’t hear. |
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 ommunication involves all of the senses, including interpretation, reaction, imagination and learnt experiences. In a digital experience, communication is no different. Like a film, a digital experience is a journey. Where you start and where you go are not random events, but are meticulously planned. The importance of this planning is essential. Its remit is as wide as your goals and encompasses wider social issues and situations relevant to your product.
For communication, a pass-the-parcel approach to digital will not impart the integrity and consistency required. Like film directors, digital directors ensure your communication is concepted, built upon and clarified across your entire digital project. A digital project can be representative of all aspects of your communication, but only if it is given the respect it deserves. |
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A selection of brand love projects created by us.
"Nick and Owen have provided fantastic assistance through the start-up phase of our new company. They brought clarity and understanding to the brand-design process, their workshop approach enabled us to get a clear idea of our brand identity and their subsequent assistance in terms of logo and website design has been exceptional. Their unique combination of company/product analysis with creative marketing experience has proven to be one of the most useful activities we've undertaken."
Ian Watson, Director of Framework Training - earnings tripled in their 2nd year of trading.
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© 2008-2012 DarkRed Consulting
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