Brand

NPD for Florette secures strong listings!

It’s always satisfying when new product development makes it to market – and here’s a terrific win for the Florette team – The Crow Flies loved working with the team to create and build the concept.

*New* Florette Asian Style Salad – a simple bag kit that brings you a taste of Japan. Each bag combines a mix of salad leaves and vegetables, a dressing and a topping. Listings confirmed in Sainsbury’s, ASDA, Nisa and Booth’s so far! Oishī!

And the brand looking so very smart in it’s new togs too!

If you are looking for help with your new product or new service development, The Crow Flies can give you a wing up without any flapping!
Get in touch!

Brand Consistency; a Loose-Tight balance

If you’re managing brands, ‘consistency’ is often interpreted like a rulebook written in stone — logos always at 14 degrees, fonts strictly followed, tone of voice guidelines followed to the final full. stop. In practice though, brand consistency isn’t about rigid control. It’s about knowing which parts of your brand need to be tight, and which can — and should — be loose.

When struck, that balance, allows a brand to be instantly recognisable, yet also relevant, adaptable, and real.

Tight where it counts: the distinctive assets

Let’s start with the “tight” part. Reflecting the seminal work of Prof Jenni Romaniuk, if your brand has genuine distinctive assets — those recognisable, memorable cues lodged in our brains that help people think of you before anyone else — they should be protected and reinforced consistently. These might include your logo, colour palette, design assets, or a sound, shape or aroma you own. Just remember that not everything you like or use qualifies as ‘distinctive’.

If you’re running a brand be brutally honest about what is actually distinctive. Assets you feel are important may hardly be known by your consumers. Just because you’re close to it, doesn’t mean a consumer is. Memorability and distinctiveness is built by being boringly repetitious and consistent. Audit your assets; understand those which are working hard for you in driving mental availability; and have the attitude that reinforcing what you have is likely to be more effective than creating something new.

This is ‘tightness’. Reinforcing the right assets, in the right way, at scale; this is how you’ll spark the synapses and create those vital neural pathway that lurk, persistently in the brain. It’s how your brand becomes recognisable at a glance — whether it’s the sensory overload of digital or on a supermarket shelf.

Loose where it’s human

Beyond your core assets, is where you can be looser.

Executional flexibility isn’t a threat to consistency; it’s a way to show your precious ‘authenticity’ and also reflect the context of your audience. Your brand needs to be able to flex for formats, channels, cultures, and in the moment. As long as your brand’s core feeling remains recognisable — through your tone, language, your values, or sensory touch points — then variation is not dilution or inconsistency, it’s flexing to fit.

Consistency of meaning, not mechanics

The human brain is brilliant at spotting patterns and navigating, like being able to ‘fill in the gaps’ and still make sense of what’s written when letters are missing from words. Brands that are tight on the essentials can earn the right for their audience to be able to fill in the gaps. This goal means consistency of meaning — not just of execution. Ensuring everything your brand does adds up to a coherent impression in people’s minds. Not every execution needs to look or sound identical, but they do need to feel like they’re coming from the same place.

The question to think about is whether this execution strengthens what we want our brand to be known for? Does it reinforce the distinctive codes we’re trying to build? If the answer is yes, don’t get hung up on minor inconsistencies – focus on coherence, not conformity.

Build what matters, bend where you can

Ultimately, brand consistency is means being tight on the things that matter, and loose on the things that don’t. Be tight on your distinctive assets (only once you’ve honestly validated what they are and have the potential to be distinctive for you). Be loose in how you flex, adapt, and activate your brand — especially in fast-moving or creative environments.

The brand is a system; at its heart are the ‘tight’ elements; the product or experiential truth that has made it relevant over time. On the surface are the ‘loose’ elements; the language, idioms and ‘clothes’ that keep it relevant in the modern day.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670 or +44 (0) 7885 408367; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2025

Brand Growth: More Is Rarely More

Increasingly, the pressure is on brand marketeers and the businesses they serve to do more to drive growth with ever tightening budgets. When brands are being challenged from many different quarters, be it own label challengers or agile, ‘edgy’ brands, the endless temptations of “new is better, old is dead”, and lubricated by a soup of increasingly capricious consumers, you can understand why. ‘Spare’ investment to test and learn, with the acceptance that elements could likely fail, feels like a luxury from a bygone era.

This can lead to the poorly informed seeking ‘new news’ and worshipping at the alters of false marketing Gods. Tempted by the lurid snake oil charms of the next best thing, much activity intended to build brands and enhance company value, often has the opposite effect. In the rush to do more, with less, it’s wise to pause and consider if there are more effective alternatives for growth. Here are a few growth alternatives to counter ‘the usual suspects’:

Issue 1: ‘salami slicing’ your brand’s product quality.
At a time when the cost of goods and taxes have risen so sharply and beyond any sensible forecast, it’s only natural that attention turns to how these costs can be reduced. But when it comes to changes in product quality, a snip here and there, perhaps imperceptible in the short term, or invisible inside the business, will be noticed by those outside, if not immediately, then soon. Remember that consumers migrating away from your brand is likely to be imperceptible in the short term, but very noticeable not long after – and difficult to stop by that point.

Growth Alternative…
Understand what your product truth is and relentlessly protect and amplify it. Great brands are built from undeniable, defensible and owned product truths, often a key foundation of what makes your brand distinctive. Once you know this, you can look for cost savings that support your brand, e.g. cheaper, more sustainable packaging or actually you may find you can add cost because the value exchange reinforces the very thing that consumers buy your brand for.

Issue 2: Fight on more fronts. Win more victories.
It’s easy to slip into a ‘more is more’ attitude without realising it, or believing that in today’s tech-enabled world (a) we can manage this and (b) we can manage this effectively. And initially it can feel energising…. new frontiers for brand growth? Whoopee! Wrong. Not only will you drive yourself burn out, it’s unlikely, unless you really do have considerable, sustained, investment, that all this new stuff will even be noticed. Media fragmentation doesn’t mean personalisation. It means more opportunities to be missed. New messaging on the brand doesn’t mean ‘new news’ and excitement, it means dissonance for your consumer versus what they love you for. Tech doesn’t drive enablement and efficiently. It drives endless filler that fills up the working day with low value-add.

Growth Alternatives…
(i) Decide what not to do.
Virtually everyone, and certainly most organisations collectively, have eyes bigger than their stomachs. Stop prioritising from a long list; instead sacrifice to get a short list. If you’re building a brand, repeatable, scalable consistency is a win-win, so it pays to remember the power of refreshed repetition.

(ii) Don’t get bored with your positioning.
As humans we only have so much mental processing capacity and brain space to consider things. If you’re of the opinion that someone will consider your brand more important, or for longer, than their family, friends, job, or dog, then bon chance and viel glück. Find out what people love about you and then reinforce and leverage the hell out of it. Resist endlessly extending the agenda.

Issue 3: Following in the competitor furrow rather than ploughing it yourself.
When the competitor grass looks greener it can be oh-so tempting to try to mimic your way to success. But who wants more of the same when they’re already happy with what they’ve got? In truth if you closely align to your competition, you are more likely to fall into their shadow even more.

Growth Alternative…
Remember the Magnet and the Mirror.
Step back and confront some hard realities. Knowing what elements of your category you may need to ‘mirror’ for reassurance, and what elements of your brand are your leadership ‘Magnets’ will prevent you from being pulled in different directions.

Rigourous diagnosis, born from well-specified consumer research. Simplicity of focus when developing activity. Fighting on just a few fronts that matter to consumer and brand, sacrificing the others. Scaling with as much effort as you can muster, year in year out. That’s the alternative growth prognosis we recommend this year.

Gael Laurie is Brand Building Director of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. gael@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670 or +44 (0) 7885 408367; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2025

Brand humility

When managing brands client-side, I used to advise every new starter in the marketing team to write down all their associations with the brand on their starting day, particularly so if they were new to the company, and keep it for future reference.

Because from that day forward, their immersion into a biased world would begin – both overtly, being professional and getting thoroughly up to speed with the brand, and tacitly, taking on (typically non-consciously) the cultural or group beliefs, myths, opinions and legends of that brand, like layers accreting one upon the next.

Much of the immersion is required to run the brand of course. And much is positive; after all, if a Brand Manager can’t champion a brand, who the heck can? But many of those layers – and it can be difficult to spot which – become biases or curved lenses which distort the truth. And distortions of the truth mean that you can’t easily stand back and have an honest, objective, critical awareness of the brand and how it’s really standing relative to the other players and competitors.

So view your brand with humility. Ensure that you are researching the brand well and researching it with dispassion and regularity, giving yourself the tools to more accurately wear your target consumers’ shoes, even if they do whiff a bit. Yes, publicly beat the drum; but privately be tough on the brand. That’s the path to making the best decisions.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2023

Shout don’t whisper

Here’s a Crow blog we wrote for our friends at Soil Association Certification – they’re the UK’s biggest organic certifier and a key player in the organic movement. The organic sector is brim-full or innovative, entrepreneurial, exciting new brands across all sort of categories. Brands driven by people who want to do some good and do good business. Organic itself has been going through unprecedented growth – until COVID came along and chucked a ruddy great spanner into the works.

So this short piece addresses some of the questions being asked:

everyone wants to know what’s going to happen post pandemic – but be careful, it’s a fools’ errand
use the lockdown time wisely to really understand your brand: the message (positioning) that has most power and the memory structures (design, assets, sounds, experiences) that stand out for your brand
don’t box yourself into a niche – a niche which probably is a fantasy
go big on a few things that count

There’s messages for all brands in there. Have a read – link below – and give us a shout if you’d like to chat more about any of these themes.

http://ow.ly/P0E750zt8kk

Success for Whitworths

It’s always great when work that impacts the market gets recognised and one of The Crow Flies long-standing clients, Whitworths, has had just that. We’re delighted to have played our part in the wider team that helped turnaround the Whitworths brand – we’ve partnered with them on research, strategy, innovation and planning . Read more about it in the Telegraph (below).

This was a great example of brand building – a team effort working with great partners (a big call out to Springett’s and Chapter), consistent focus on consumer and commercial insights, and then making some tough choices to free up the space, time and resources to impact the market.

If you’d like to chat to us about your brand building challenge, be it strategy, research, innovation or brand planning, we’d love to talk. And well done to Big Phil and the team at Whitworths!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/business-club/consumer-retail/whitworths-brand-repositioning/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_li

Santa: a timeless “brand”

Brand Bedrock

Great brands become great because they become known for something. They put down anchors in the brains of their target consumers which give them something to grip on to, some foundations, something to build from. Yet so often, the stewards of brands – the brand team, the leadership in a business – are too easily tempted to move away from the brand’s positioning on the basis of a loud voice pushing for something different, a hunch, a whim, or worse, a staff change or a new leader agitating for change for change’s sake.

To move from being unknown, to OK, to good, to ultimately being a famous brand, needs foundations of stone: deep, heavy, able to stand up to quakes and surprises; to stand the test of time.

Practically, the way a brand team achieves this is by writing an effective and engaging brand plan – one that builds on the brand’s greatness established by its forebears at great effort and cost, one that truly impacts the consumer in the present, and one that keeps it on course to deliver its purpose as it strides into the future.

Most brands plans don’t do this and there are some common, yet pretty fundamental, errors:

‘Starting again’ every time (normally every year)
‘New year, new trend’
‘New year, new positioning’
An infatuation with insights for insights sake or no insight base to the plan whatsoever
A grossly optimistic belief in what the brand can achieve in a year, compounded by underfunded activities
No alignment, or misalignment, in the business around that brand and the plan

At their heart, brand plans are simple things – and it’s this simplicity that makes them devilishly difficult to manage through a business. What helps is having the right approach to the planning process and a plan construct that flows systematically from enablers and blockers of growth for the brand, through to a clear strategy, through to bold activity. In essence, there are 5 steps:

Filter and focus: it’s critical to identify the enablers and blockers of growth from the whole of the external and internal environment. Critical because if you don’t fully assess what’s going on (a) you may miss something really important and (b) some wag elsewhere in the business will tell you about something (that they believe is) vital to the brand’s growth and be a constant irritant (and they may be right of course, just to make it worse). So get out there: get curious about consumers; get engaged with the real world. Push into politics and technology, economics and the environment, big trends and packaging tweaks. Gather all your data, all your clues about what’s impacting the world of your brand and your consumers and ask ‘so what?’ Filter, filter, filter – a long, encyclopaedic list, neatly gathered together into a SWOT is all very nice, but useless unless you have filtered and focused it down on what can help the brand grow and what may stop it growing.
Consumer and connection: there are two issues with consumer targeting. Going too broad (“Millennials” or “Women, 18-34”) and going too narrow (“Here’s Dan, he’s 27, lives in Balham and drives a Renault Twizzy, and likes Turmeric Lattes.”…). Both are unhelpful. Be clear on your ‘who’ by defining the parameters (which come from the ‘broad’ approach and beliefs and attitudes (which come from the ‘narrow’ approach). Don’t name the consumer – it puts people off – and be careful if you give them a segment name (“Hectic Conversationalists!”) in case stakeholders can’t easily picture them). But most importantly, stop worrying about the who and really consider the what: what connects people to your brand? What are the brand hooks? What are the little problems your brand does or could solve? Are there any deeper needs that the brand meets? Use these as your constant and consistent touch points.
Link to growth: any brand manager worth their salt will have an intuitive sense of where the growth lies and where the issues could be. But a great brand plan links these to the enablers and blockers from the filtering process in a clear, logical and dogged way. You’re looking for 2 – 3 action platforms. That’s it. And the less, the better. And for each of those, no more than 3 actions. Take your budget and carve it up into 6 – 9 big activities and you have a chance of landing them. Then repeat those for a few years (3 – 5) and you increase your chances of success. This is the most difficult stage – choosing NOT to focus on certain things. Having the tenacity to stand up to the leaders – or your peers – in the business and say, “No – we’re going to do a few things with scale”. It sounds easy, but it’s where most plans flounder.
Orientate around a Bedrock Question: doing a cut down version of the brand plan is always an afterthought: write the plan, then condense it. But it shouldn’t be like that, because the condensed, beating heart of the plan, should be… well, at the heart of the plan. We call this the bedrock question – the point where the insights from the external environment, meet the brand’s purpose & commercial goals and shift into action.
Ensure there are golden threads: it shouldn’t really be the case but most plans fail because the plan itself underwhelms. If your plan has a clear link from the insights – the enablers of growth – all the way through to a few, scaled-up activities; if there is a clear ‘narrative’ that you can tell when selling the brand plan in and through the business – then your brand has a chance of impacting the consumer and making a difference. Don’t underestimate the time and effort needed to get alignment and agreement to the plan, and don’t underestimate how much easier it is if the plan has a golden thread running through it.

Getting the brand bedrock at the heart of the plan is the distilled essence of great brand management – and the distilled essence of a great brand too.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that finds the direct route to success for categories and brands. david@thecrowflies.co.uk | +44 (0) 1889 725670 | http://www.linkedin.com/company/the-crow-flies-ltd?trk=company_name | https://www.facebook.com/thecrowfliesltd © The Crow Flies, 2018

Beware the bubble

Having moved from ‘client side’ brand building to ‘agency side’ after twenty years (something I’m consistently told is quite unusual), I’m often asked what advice I would give to marketeers running brands in business today. Well, rather like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the big thing is to beware the bubble:

The bubble of belief that you understand consumers.
Understanding people is a lifelong pastime. It requires on-going curiosity and nosiness. It absolutely requires the belief that you can be proved wrong at any time.

The bubble of belief that in your business ‘that’s how life is’.
I used to fall for this one. That somehow, the air here is rarer, special, unique. That we have to work harder or longer in order to stay competitive. It’s not. You’re not. Challenge yourself all the time as to how you can simplify what you do and how you do it. How you can have a bigger impact with less resource in less time.

The bubble of delusion that your brand really matters
No brand is un-replaceable. Go in with that attitude, a bit of brand humility, keep it close, and you won’t go far wrong.

The bubble of confidence that belies what consumers really think
If you ever find yourself sitting in a research group, and think ‘we know this already’ … stop yourself. If you do know it, are you acting on it? I’m constantly flabbergasted by how the simple insights or the obvious problems to solve aren’t being worked on (often because they’re seen as generic, or owned by another brand. Are they? Really? Really?)

The bubble of brand immortality
Brands are entities created by humans that have a lifecycle. Not a smooth one like in the textbooks, but a lifecycle nonetheless. You can eat healthily and you can stay fit. So can brands. But ultimately your brand will die. Manage the portfolio carefully and ensure that you pass on anything you touch in better condition than when it was handed to you. But when it’s time to go, cut the cord and focus on the next generation.

The bubble of hype
Stay close to market developments. Be interested in consumers, in retailers. Be interested in the world of your agencies not just companies. Read and listen and get out more. But don’t forget that brand building is a skill and has core disciplines – research, strategy, innovation, planning, design, communications – be the best you can be at these to the level appropriate to your role today and where you want to go tomorrow.

The bubble of capacity and capability
If you find yourself being asked to do this and this and this and this. If, you believe you can… then pause. Forget the stereotypes about women can multi-task and men can’t, the point is this. We can only be effective if we focus on given tasks and execute them thoroughly. Same for brands. Do less. Sacrifice – not prioritise and slice – sacrifice; and then put everything into hammering them into the market and the minds of your target.

The bubble of self-importance
You’re just someone making their way in the world. Beware the trappings of power and try to stay humble, open and connected.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy, innovation and brand planning company that finds the direct route to success for categories and brands. david@thecrowflies.co.uk // +44 (0) 1889 725670. You can follow The Crow Flies on Linked In (http://www.linkedin.com/company/the-crow-flies-ltd?trk=company_name), on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/thecrowfliesltd).

Fabric Brands

When you work on brands, shopping takes on a different angle. Take the food shop; rather than it being one of those in-and-out missions, each shop sees me become more like David Bellamy, snuffling around in the undergrowth in the weedy patch round the back of the shed. A new journey, re-surveying the terrain; discovering; getting curious, being – quite frankly – extremely nosy. If you are tagging along I understand how this can become tedious – but *guilty pleasure alert* – not for me.
My most recent shopping snuffling made me realise how many brands on our shelves are old favourites, now unloved. Late in their life cycle; somehow deemed to be not relevant enough for Millennials, or Digital Natives or even, your Mum. Great brand names. Famous brand names. Brands with a store of goodwill and memories. Brands that are part of our identities. Fabric brands.

Fabric brands are those brands that have become part of the weave and weft of a society. They are part of the social currency, part of the culture, part of the thinking that societies and cultures can’t define themselves by intangible, virtual communities alone, but by real things. Material transactions, God Forbid. And fabric brand status should be something that most brands should be seeking to attain; yet it is not a term that is widely used nor understood. Fabric brands deliver functionally and emotionally, but they are rarely badges of exclusivity – the opposite in fact – fundamentally, they are about inclusivity. You can’t simply buy these brands and understand, you need to live with them, they with you. Knowledge of the brand; the associations with the brand, are so broad that an assumptive knowingness becomes part of the personality. Gaps need not be filled by the brand itself because they are often filled by its users. There is a common sense of meaning. Many large brands could show these traits but fabric brands have something else: they have a shared cultural heritage with their end-user.

This is undoubtedly higher state of brand development – but it is far from unattainable – as supermarket shelves will attest. Indeed, they are littered with famous brand names, that seem to be connected only by their owners either being unable to justify the investment in them or diverting investment on to other priorities. Haywards or Maynards; Robertson’s marmalade or Gales Honey. Kiwi Shoe Polish or Lyle’s Golden Syrup; Rolo or Turkish Delight. Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers or R. Whites. Dettol or Mr Porky’s. And it’s not just in our supermarkets, but along the high street too, from Timpsons, to Waterstones, from Millets – even to M&S.

This is not, in an age of Brexit, about Britishness. The best fabric brands are most likely immigrants that we have taken to our hearts: Heinz Ketchup, Mars Bars, Kellogg’s Cornflakes. And this is not about being no longer relevant: A Rolo is as unrepentantly indulgent today as it was when I saved my last one for that special someone years ago. It’s not even that these brands have some higher-level purpose – most don’t. Nor do they necessarily deliver better functionally, relative to their competition – just ask people of a certain age to name which is best, HP or Daddy’s sauce, and stand back – but which is (was?) the fabric brand? No question.

What does define these brands is something simple yet difficult to attain. Fabric brands manage to make it to the top of the brand pyramid. Awareness is nailed. Associations with the brand are clearly mapped; Advantage is established, even if it is perceptual. Where they are different is that there is genuine affection. And the affection is two-way. Consumers love these brands because they can offer a point of view that only those immersed in that culture would understand. They bond, not through relentlessly hammering home their point of difference (although they are likely to be reasonably large spenders), but because they get you and are part of you. They do what many brands struggle with; they bond and connect at an emotional level. Many brands aspire to be friends; but fabric brands become family. They can take the mickey without offending because we allow them to, indeed, we encourage them to.

But many are withering on the vine. And this is because the true fabric brands are never assumptive about their future status. They know that even family ties can be broken; they know that innocent flirting can quickly lead to divorce. They know that fabric status requires constant nurturing, remaining relevant by staying fresh (for example through innovation). They know that continued dialogue, honing their emotive appeal is essential. For the biggest risk for fabric brands is being commoditised through over-familiarity. Or the dreaded process of cost-optimisation undermines the product to the point where the premium, the love, can no longer be justified.

And this shines a light on the lie of the over promises of digital marketing. In a world of ever more personalised channels, fabric brands should be able to blossom – being relevant, of the moment, and immersed in your world. Yet it’s not happening. Many famous brands are struggling. They can’t seem to survive in the age of the Discount retailer or stringent advertising regulation. Because fabric brands are a part of the culture; to grow they need to impact culture itself. That means communication that is bold and impactful, not for one, but for many. Until we come to our senses, it’ll take more than a fabric plaster to solve that.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps identify the direct route to success for brands and businesses. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670.