My teacher, my friend, my father.

January 1st 2016. I had planned to make this year my best one yet in business.

But stuff didn’t work out like that and it ended up being the most testing year of my life to date.

It all started when I took my father into hospital in late December 2015 with stomach pains. The news wasn’t good but despite him having emergency surgery to remove his large intestine, I was convinced that everything would be fine when I woke up the next day.

Christmas in Critical Care was hard but not as hard as New Year’s Day 2016, ironically my father’s birthday. That’s when I had the phone call from him, informing me that he had terminal cancer and had been given up to a year to live.

Instead of 2016 being the year I put everything I knew to the test gaining some more experience with global brands within a better-established agency than my own, I chose to use my position as a small business owner to stand by my father every step of the way through his cancer. This included intensive chemotherapy, numerous meetings with consultants and ended up with daily visits to Sue Ryder, Thorpe Hall Hospice nearing the end of the year.

On 17th November 2016 I was with my father as he passed aged just 58. He fought a courageous battle to the end.

My father would often tell me: “Son, you should be working; you have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay.” I would always reply “Dad, I can make more money, but I can’t make more time”.

Apart from the fact the time was way too short, I don’t have any regrets about all the time we had together. Nor do I regret the reality of facing up to the fact that, of course, my father was right, and things are tight.

My father taught me a great deal of things and was key to my unconventional route into the creative industry. Having served as traditionally time-served sign writer, he taught me about the shapes of letters, fonts, kerning and basic emotional connections with different types of letter styles. It sounds simple, but no one really teaches this kind of stuff to the level I was taught it. Looking back, it has given me a fabulous grounding for doing what I do. It also provided a platform to work on projects with iconic Formula 1 brands, including Goodyear Racing, Bridgestone Motorsport, and at the time, Jordan F1, Jaguar F1 and Minardi F1 with my father’s company. There was so much more besides this too.

This is just a small fraction of stuff that relates to business – of course my father was so much more to me and I’m lucky to have known him as well as I did, in fact he ended up being my best friend and someone who I could talk about anything too.

I have just got over kidney stones which erupted shortly before my father’s funeral. I didn’t make his wake for the pain, and ended up in hospital. Thankfully this has cleared up now.

It’s been a difficult year, but I remain optimistic; I have learnt more this year that I could have imagined and I’m better prepared and equipped than I was at the start of it.

Business is often portrayed as a cold, hard world. But it’s not true everywhere. There are good people about, I have had contact with them in the past and as 2017 approaches I look to reboot - stronger, wiser, more determined and most importantly, kinder than ever.

I don’t know where 2017 will take me, but I do know that I am open to all opportunities that come my way with my business Sensation Creative, or even elsewhere, should the right opportunity come my way – who knows.

One thing is absolutely for sure: I’m ready.

Simon Bell

Director

Sensation Creative

It started with a dream

Image: www.facebook.com/regalparkproperty

It started with a dream, and has been executed with passion and precision.

A few years ago I had a client walk into my studio. He was working for an estate agency, and had been informed that he was loosing his job around Christmas time. This is when I told him about my idea for an estate agency brand.

Most people laughed at me when I said I was going to create an estate agency brand that people loved, especially with a modest budget. But passion and the power of ideas came into force: we created a team and got to work.

I had decided to call the company Regal Park and the idea would use marketing techniques inspired by Saatchi & Saatchi's Lovemarks, in addition to neuro-psychology and other science based research, coupled with a healthy dose of creativity and intuition. All of which are absolutely required as part of the creative process to communicate brands across all the various platforms, on and off line, in today's world.

Fast forward two years and the company has just won its first awards, as voted for by customers on AllAgents.co.uk, the UK’s largest customer review website for the property industry.

Peterborough is growing really fast and there are a lot of established estate agents competing in this crowded market which makes me even happier and underlines the importance of a shared vision, consumer understanding and good branding.

Here’s a brief write up about the awards in the local media.

Regal Park - The truth is moving. One of my favourite projects.

Simon Bell

Sensation Creative | Director

The three elements: love, science and creativity, have become crucial for my brand creative and positioning styles. See more example of work at: SensationCreative.com 

What makes a good designer?

Image: Shutterstock

In a world overloaded with businesses, logos, websites and social media sites, good branding is more important than ever.

So what makes a good brand designer?

It is not only the singular creative thoughts of a designer that counts. If a designer relies on this alone, design for branded communication will lack in sense and lose touch with its purpose.

It is a designer’s ability to rationalise cognitive response to emotional stimuli through the eyes of another person that makes them effective. Only when a designer is operating in this area, are they able to position their own ideas and creative process to connect with today's consumer through their work.

Why is this important for brands?

This type of process helps designers to create work that disrupts overloaded markets, not drown in them.

To understand the importance of creating the right type of brand imagery, we must look at the conscious mind and how it interprets this type of visual stimuli. We can then understand why it is important for a designer to have an empathetic connection with another person, or people, cultures and so on.

To start, understand that we are driven by emotion. As humans, we work by rationalising our emotional response to different stimuli. It is our interpretation of our own feelings when provoked by these different stimuli that define the choices we make.

It is not just the ability to come across different stimuli that is important. This is something we do every day thousands of times. A lot of the time, we reject what we come across because it doesn’t fit with our own unfolding narrative or sense of self. To understand this is important.

Test this for yourself: when it comes to adverts for example, they are everywhere, online, on TV and in the high street are just a few places you will have come across them in their hundreds. How many can you recall from yesterday? Are you surprised with the low number answer you have provided yourself with? Perhaps. 

Ownership of imagery in the conscious mind.

We have discovered that to come across stimuli especially visual imagery, in our every day lives is simply not enough to have impact on us. This is because the decisive step did not take place: Conscious image ownership. To quote neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: “The decisive step in making of consciousness is not the making of images and creating the basics of a mind. The decisive step is making the images ours, making them belong to their rightful owners, the singular, perfectly bounded organisms in which they emerge.”

When we decide to pay attention to something it is because it resonates with us on some level. It fits with our internal narrative so we seek to find out more.

Telling stories.

How does what we have decided upon consciously owning develop? We tell ourselves stories. This is part of our cognitive response to stimuli, and helps develop the depth of conscious ownership.

So it looks like it could fit. Time to analyse.

During this decision making process we gather new and existing information and work out if what we have come across is suitable. When coming across a branded product or service, the story of that brand, its communication and relevance comes into conscious play. This knowledge brings to light the importance of engaging brand communication across all touch points.

We will draw on past experiences and current ones as we begin to tell ourselves a story of how this product or service fits into our lives. If it is something we really desire, we will even tell ourselves lies to make it fit in with our narrative so that we can justify our decision to, make a purchase, for example.

An example of self-story telling: We know fast food might not be good for us, but ‘I’ve earned it today’ or ‘I haven’t got time to cook a meal, ‘I shouldn’t buy a 6th cup of coffee but I need it!’ It works all the way up; ‘My car is fine, but I think this one would be even better because...’, ‘That house in the country would be a great place to relax’. Your self-story telling creates the vision that the brand communication helped to provoke.

Consumers are in charge and are ultra-savvy.

Consumers have the world at their fingertips. They are more informed than ever and the branded products they buy have touch points everywhere: The high street, events, social gatherings, the internet of things; websites, apps, social media.

Consumers are likely to come across all types of brands several times, before making a purchase. This means that consistent brand communication across all platforms and environments is paramount.

There are a huge array of brands aggressively advertising, hoping that your conscious mind will interact with them. This is complicated because we have the consumers general dislike of adverts, they do not like them interrupting their lives - the use of ad blockers is rocketing which proves this.

It is not that people do not like adverts. To quote Mark Goldstein: “People hate advertising in general, but they love advertising in particular.” To quote Cindy Gallop on this statement: “If you ask the man or woman on the street; ‘So what do you think of advertising?’, they’ll say; ‘Oh I bloody hate it.’ But if you ask the man or woman in the street, ‘what’s your favourite ad?’ they’ll say: ‘Oh I really love that Nike advert...’ and so on.

It is not our knowledge about how we work as humans that is important – knowledge is a commodity. It is the ability to understand all the above and apply it to our creative process that is the decisive step. This is what makes a good designer. 

Simon Bell.

Simon is the creative director and owner of Sensation Creative.

To enquire about Simon's branding services via Sensation Creative in the UK please email:

Simon(dot)Bell(at)SensationCreative.com

See examples of Simon's work, meet his team and learn more at: www.SensationCreative.com

Brand consideration: User experiences.

I’ve been thinking about the purchasing journey and in particular, the role that brands play in user experiences.

Becoming ‘experiences’ aware is the first step. Big business gets it. It not a case of ‘user experience’ but a case of ‘user experiences’. The plural is key.

If you consider where and how often we potentially interact with brands it starts to make sense: in the high street, in print, in the supermarket, online with e-commerce, social media, then environments that support social events and so one. Brands are practically everywhere.

Added to this, every brand is vying for our attention from all these different platforms, using a mixture of sophistication data driven algorithms to find us, and emotive advertising to capture and hold our attention.

It’s crazy.

The sheer volume of information and choices we are facing can be fantastic but also confusing. As consumers, it’s not surprising that sometimes we’re a bit bamboozled by it all, at times splitting hairs as we make up our minds over a purchase.

Given the vast range of products and services available to us, often available in just a few clicks via e-commerce, it’s also not surprising that brand loyalty is increasingly hard to maintain. And yet, even in these ultra-competitive times, the opportunity is always there for brands to win. And they do, some very well too.

You don’t have to be a huge multi-national to win. Okay, sure it helps but the playing field is more level than ever; anyone can create a logo and a website – for free, and millions of people have done just that, it’s practically become a right.

However, it doesn’t mean that it’s all good. Not by a long way, everything has become a commodity: A logo – so what. A brand - who cares. A website – you mean another one. No one cares. This is why user experiences are so important now.

Largely due to this, ‘ideas’ have become the key currency in helping drive business and brands. Good ideas are okay. Great ideas fuel passion, attraction, keep us engaged, create movements and get us to participate. All vital for branded user experiences - especially where purchase is the goal.

Here are a few of my basic thoughts and advice on branding that helps to create good user experiences.

Start with the basics. Your logo and brand name encapsulate all your brand stands for. Consider the brand name, how it’s pronounced, and with global reach, consider the impact different languages could have on this.

Consider different operating environments for the logo: from old school business cards and stationery, to printed media, up to large format print, and then right back down to a profile image on social media. Make your brand identity scalable; the first rule is that people can read it, if not you’ve already failed because that’s a bad experience so fix it – fast.

Create consistency in your marketing and advertising adds to great consumer experiences because it helps to make sense and maintain clarity in the long run.

My feeling is that generally, after seeing one advert, it’s perfectly possible, but fairly unlikely that a consumer will make a spontaneous purchase right there in that moment. Even in the supermarket where this type of action is more common, a better educated view points to purchase decisions being more likely to be based on previous interaction, research and word of mouth recommendations. This type of pre-purchase consideration may well happen quite a lot prior to purchase as we seek to clarify our choice with reassurance of its suitability.

The suitability scenario takes into account that many of us consumers are creating our own sense of brand using a combination of reality and social media which is especially important to consider.

People want to be associated with stuff that is good. In terms of product or service this could mean that we have special preferences for social responsibility, ethical values, products that are non-damaging to the environment, and that are drenched in authenticity and provenance.

Of course this is in addition to the product or service making them feel better about themselves, quite possibly in a multitude of situations and doing the job it’s supposed to do in the first place. This all adds to brand experiences and brand value so bring it into the equation.

Advice: Consider how you would shop for a product or service and what turns you on or off in that decision making process.

Brands that lack in consistency and authenticity can cast doubt in the mind of the consumer and can be off putting. Brand consistency, consistent advertising or story telling across all platforms and environments will help to eradicate any doubts that the consumer may have when interacting with a brand leading up to purchase.

Take care with elements such as typeface colour palettes, images and your message. As humans we experience the world by quantifying our emotional reactions to different stimuli. We base our choices on this. Think about how that alone effects brand communication and user experiences.

The best brands take what can often be complex communication of products or services, and make it simple. Aim to do this. Remember, we’re all over loaded with information and we don’t like adverts, so if something resonates and makes sense, you’ve created an emotional connection with that person. Hopefully a positive one. To do this, it must happen quickly or you’ll end up missing out and starting over.

I subscribe to Dr Barbara Frederickson’s evaluation of love; that it is created from ‘micro moments of positivity resonance’ and this is how it grows. Think of each moment of consumer interaction as an opportunity to build on positivity resonance for you brand.

Leave room for the addition of social responsibility, environmentally friendly points, authenticity and provenance in your equation – this will help to build trust and so adds value.

More than ever, we want instant gratification, especially in the fast consumer goods market. When people do get to the point of purchase, make sure it’s equally as considered as the journey by creating a simple, intuitive process with potential questions available to be answered instantly. This will help relieve any last minute doubts that may arise.

Think about all the platforms and environments that your brand could appear; in print, business stationery, printed adverts for magazines, leaflets and company literature. On the high street; billboards, shops. In social environments; events such as exhibitions, live music or sporting occasions with sponsorship or adverts. This list continues digitally, with websites, apps and social media and so on.

Link all these together and it adds up to how the consumer experiences your brand at each touch point.

To summarise: Good brand ‘user experiences’ are led by considering how we engage with brands today across all the various platforms and operating environments. They seek to create a consumer centric, holistic almost merry-go-around scenario, where we consumers can jump on or off at any point, whilst ensuring that the brand journey doesn’t break apart at any time and continues to make sense - no matter which part of that journey you’re at.

Simon Bell,

Director, Sensation Creative.

SensationCreative.com

How our brain processes images

Understanding primary emotional engagement has always been fascinating to me.

I was doing some research and came across perhaps the most well articulated reason for good design that I've come across from a lady called Laurie Manwell. In a video I was watching Laurie says this of our brain working out imagery:

"We assume that when we are looking at something we are analysing it based on the visual information that is entering the brain from the eyes, but this is not entirely accurate. In fact visual stimuli transduced by the rods and cones in the eyes and sent by electro chemical signals to the central nervous system via the optic nerves does not go directly to the occipital cortex which is the primary region responsible for processing information. Instead it first goes to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, another region of the brain that is a part of the limbic system and important to emotional arousal.

To put this in simpler terms, this means that you can experience an emotional reaction to something before you are consciously aware that you have even seen it, which in turn effects how you see it."

If you didn't already understand how important good design is, perhaps this helps shed a little light on things.


Simon Bell

Director
Sensation Creative