Week Nine (Final week)

MONDAY – 
Today saw the final developments for our rebranding. Cat who was in charge of redesigning the logo presented to us severeal different ideas of what the new logo could look like, we all felt that these were really strong developments and represented our re-branding ideas extremely well. The group then chose their favourite five and went around asking 20 different people of which logo they thought was the best and represented out new ethos the best.  

It is clear from this chart that the most popular logo created is logo three, so following our target markets advise we made this our final logo.

After this I then started thinking about how the new brand could be advertised and attract  our target market, as one USP point the ne brand would offer students a 15% discount, in order to appeal to a younger market which is what we want our new brand to appeal to. With this in mind I also thought of different ways to promoting the new brand, therefore by collaborating with Cat another group member she created a poster and also placed these posters into advertisement spots on the London Underground and at Bus Stops, so we could show how and where we would advertise the new brand.

Overall as a project I believe my group worked pretty well together particularly with sharing ideas and moving ideas and research along towards a final rebranded brand. Although having slight difficulties with choosing a brand to begin with I think we handled these set backs well and were still able to progress because of the support of the group.

Week Eight

WEDNESDAY –

This week the group reviewed our research so far and decided that we were in a good place to start rebranding Bench. Firstly we decided upon our new brand ethos, for this we looked at Bench’s current one which is all about multipurpose design and functionality. We didn’t want to stray too far from this which resulted in our new brand ethos and emotional touch points focusing on a minimal aesthetic but with a functionality to it a more substance over style approach but unlike current bench we want it to focus on style as well mainly so it can compete a lot better.

Brand Ethos Concept board made by Sarah

We also began brainstorming ideas for a possible slogan and new name. As we wanted to the brand to be minimal but still stylish and current the group worked on the slogan of ‘B the edge’ we felt this represents our new ethos clearly as its suggesting to our customers that they are the edge and set their own rules and are not reliant on their clothing to define them. With the new brand name the group created several different ideas, some based on the new brand ethos of minimal and being ‘the edge’ and others referring back to Bench’s heritage of being a big part of the 90’s rave and acid house scene.

New Brand Name Brainstorm

We chose the name border because we felt it represented the minimal and ‘B the edge’ theme because border relating to edge.

Week Seven (Paris)

WEDNESDAY – 

Today we visited Paris, and looked briefly at the different brands there, I mainly visited high end designer stores as well as a couple of boutiques. I looked at the difference in markets comparing the British market to the French market, from the stores I looked at I didn’t find a dramatic difference in store layout, but did feel that the products they sold had a more minimal feel to them, they were more concerned with simplistic and classic styles rather than British stores which focus more on trend and keeping up with new and diverse designs.

Chanel Window Display

Valentino (outside)

Week Six

WEDNESDAY –

Today half of our group went to convent garden to do further research on the Bench brand, they went to visit the store based there and to also interview people on their thoughts of streetwear and Bench as a brand. The information they found out was very insightful, as it has enabled us to understand our market, consumers and competitors better. The key points of what they found out were that most interviewees said that they used to like Bench however feel that it is a bit dated as they used to shop there several years ago. A Lot of them mentioned Superdry as a brand they liked and would prefer compared to Bench. This lead the group onto looking at its strengths and weaknesses and how we could make Bench more competitive and more successful than Superdry, once we have rebranded it.

Week Five

WEDNESDAY –

Today we had our formative assessment; we presented our findings so far to the tutors. After speaking to the tutors for a while explaining our ideas and thoughts for rebranding Boy London as a group we thought it would be better to choose a different brand because the tutors highlighted possible issues we may face because we have found little quantitative research about Boy London failing, our research so far was based more on qualitative research that we gathered from our Shoreditch research.

We thought about what other brands we could focus on, therefore using resources online like LSN Global and articles, we noticed that brand Bench has recently been failing highlighted by the following:

1.    Benchs’ owner Americana had a fall in profits of £24m

2.    Last year their revenue fell from £147m to £125.2m

3.    Staff levels dropped from 560 to 405 year on year

4.    Bench closed all major stores only focusing on outlet stores

5.    Couldn’t keep up with competitors

- Source - http://www.insidermedia.com/insider/north-west/88079-/