Beverage Startups
DrinkPreneur Live 2014: Honey – the creator of award winning Tesco Finest packaging design.
Recently one of the contributors for DrinkPreneur and members of the DrinkPreneur Judges and Mentors list Honey could celebrate the success of one of their works – the Tesco Finest brand. It was triumphing at the Grocer’s private label awards and customers rated the packaging design highest within the competition. Find the full article on the awards here.
DrinkPreneur had a brief interview with their commercial director – Lulu Laidlaw-Smith. Honey Creative – what they do and how they can help brands grow:
I am part of a team of brand strategists – my passion is in commercial brand strategy – we focus our expertise in ‘creating commercial growth’ for brands. We specialise in ‘retail’ – we have worked with Tesco for over 7 years (and recently launched the new positioning and redesign of Tesco finest, and we directed two other packaging design houses to realise this brand within 8 months – no mean feat, it’s currently the UK’s largest brand, valued in excess of £1.4bn).
In collaboration with our clients we create ‘vision’ planning, innovation, brand strategy & planning (which includes digital transformation for brands) we also realise design via packaging and corporate communications.
At Honey we are incredibly focused in creating commercial growth for brands. We take the commercial vision and use our creative process and branding knowledge to assume a fit with the brand and end users – which also includes internal employee engagement to wherever the consumer touch points are briefed through whichever communication channel.
We focus on the brand planning and strategy for brands to obtain the commercial goals & vision set. We also work with our clients to realise ‘vision’. Once we have completed the planning stage we then work up a creative brand brief to ensure all communication channels can refer to this as the basis of their area of expertise. Our realisation expertise is in packaging design and digital outputs. We work with experts to realise the best website (mobile, tablet or desktop) and Social Media planning for a full transformation between physical and virtual connection with consumers, always with respect to the brand and the positioning we have agreed upon. Once the rules are set, these should not be compromised.
Vision: this is a complex area, which is actually incredible simple once one has agreed on who the stakeholders are & critically how you plan your approach. Over the past ten years I have been party to a study regarding the methods of innovative companies. These companies share the same qualities. They have outperformed their competitors and the market norm, often by substantial margins. They have introduced real innovation to their markets, real innovation defined as technologies, products or services that have not been seen before. They have revolutionized their markets, introducing memes that competitors have been forced to adopt in order to compete. In terms of scale they range from the global to the local, demonstrating that innovation is not constrained by scale or reach.
These companies include: Apple, Arm, BMW, Dyson, SpaceX, Tesla, Nespresso, Solar City, Google, Innocent, Gu.
This list is not exhaustive and the study is ongoing. As many of these companies are highly secretive, it is very difficult to gain insights into how these companies think, how they are conceptually orientated, how they target and manage innovation. Additionally, we cannot easily organise access to their employees. But we can study their actions, what they do and how they do it. This approach formed the basis of our study.
Meet Lulu Laidlaw and Greg Vallance from Honey at DrinkPreneur Live 2014 on the 11th of June. Honey Commercial brand partners will offer a creative brand critic session to provide the three runner ups ‘brands’ with a brand vision – through the creation of a roadMAP – in support of (or help set) their commercial objective.
