Recoat Gallery

Recoat were set up in 2007 by a couple who studied in Dundee in illustration and graphics. They both exhibited at D&AD and were offered jobs but they declined the offer to start work in scotland. After slow progress they decided to start up a gallery. They now host shows several times a year inviting special guests such as Insa, Crash and Daze and Mark Mignanelli.

We chose to interview this gallery because its relevant to the subjects we're studying now. We all have a keen interest in urban art and enjoy seeing big companies like red bull sponsoring galleries like this. 

Famous Graff artist Insa Painting in Birmingham. This piece is huge! He has exhibited at the recoat gallery in glasgow before.

http://recoatdesign.com/ We'll be interviewing these guys for a module project very soon :)

The Final Presentation

1. Feel Good is a company that was created in 2002. Three people who were originally  working for coca cola left the company and started up business on their own. Their idea was to create healthy drinks that tasted good. This brands image is fun, fruity and healthy and boasts their attitude of ‘no added sugar’. 

Nine years on and the company is successfully selling one Feel Good drink every two seconds. But with the aim to be selling more, two briefs have been created to work on Feel Good advertising. 

2. So to discover what the strategic issues are we worked on a few market research tools to pin point what needs tackled. We created a Perception map to view where the product stood on the market and work out why it wasn’t where Feel Good wants. This is where we found Feel Good to sit on the map (point to powerpoint) and this is where we want to reposition it...

3.This showed us that the problem lies in awareness and availablitity. The product is not sold in many shops and customers don’t know where to go to purchase it. We'd like the product to still be the same but literally just move it along the awareness line.  

4. To learn more about the target market we handed out questionnaires to see how the public felt about the product and to see who our ideal buyers would be. After this we made up three profile personas to narrow down who we wanted this campaign to target. So with this research done and after reading the briefs we decided to combine brief one and two. To create a campaign that raised awareness and also informed the customer that these Feel Good drinks contain no added sugar. 

5. Our solution is based around a Feel Good App. We decided to take different approach to the previous advertising as we felt it was not working. A change from tv adverts and wanting to keep up to date with recent technology we created a smart phone app. This app is made up of addictive games that would get people talking, spreading the word and playing. Part of this app is that once levels on the game are completed, you can claim rewards and discounts for Feel Good Drinks.

6. The campaigns process. Our campaign would kick off with a series of leaflets being handed out that advertised our app but also has a sample of juice inside. (HAND OUT JUICES) The sample would be similar to what you are trying now. Feel Good juices are tasty and healthy but not well known. These samples would be enough to let the public try the product and love it. The samples would be handed out in shopping malls, student unions and supermarkets. This would make the public want to know more about Feel Good drinks and find out where to purchase. 

7. Along with the leaflets we have made up a series of business cards. (HAND OUT CARDS) Little cards that are in the shape of the 400ml bottles advertising the brand image and what the bottles look like. The main point of these little cards is to advertise and interest people in the app. On the back will have a QR code which can be scanned on a smart phone to receive a 20p discount of the app which will be retailing at 79p. This will encourage people to buy the app which in return will have people buying more bottles of Feel Good when they complete the gaming levels and receive their offer. 

8. The App is made up of three parts, two are games and one interactive activity. The first one shown here is our interactive activity called Fruit Shake. This allows you to pick all your favourite fruits, pull them into the Feel Good bottle, shake and then the bottle will reveal the Feel Good flavour suited to you. Then through a GPS function will tell you where the nearest retailer of the juice is So no more wondering the streets looking for your favourite juice. 

9. This is the first game (Fruit fall) designed taking inspiration from older classic online games creating a nostalgic feeling. The idea is to control the bottle at the bottom of the screen sliding from left to right and to try and catch the falling fruit. Not only will fruit be falling out of the sky but so will evil sugar cubes which must be avoided. If a sugar cube lands in the bottle, your bottle will spill all over the screen and you will need to start again. This is to highlight that Feel Good drinks have no added sugar and to show that they are only packed full of fruit. 

10. The second game (Fruit Smash) is similar to popular games such as angry birds. You will be given four fruits of your choice to ping into walls of sugar cubes. Again highlighting sugar in a bad way. The fruits will smash into the sugar which will knock the walls down and will complete the level when all sugar is gone.

11. To receive the awards you need to collect 'apples'. Apples are awarded when levels are completed on the two games. In fruit fall for every bottle filled correctly 2 apples will be awarded and saved in your cyber basket. In Fruit Smash apples will be awarded depending on how many fruits it takes for you to knock down the sugar wall. Once 30 apples are collected in your basket you will receive a QR code to be scanned at tills to redeem 50p off 400ml bottles. 

12. This campaign will gain the awareness needed to raise Feel Good's sales. The sample leaflets and business cards will let people taste the goodness themselves and the business cards encourage app buyers. The App will be able to travel virally causing talk and encouragement of playing games to receive benefits. We believe this is what it will take to make Feel Good sales rise dramatically. 

Collett Dickenson Pearce Magazine Layout

This is the start of my layout for a magazine article. Most of the photography is my own and I've themed it around baseline magazine to answer the brief.

BLOCK 2 RESEARCH-Edward Bernays: Engineering of Consent

Ive just been reading an essay today by Bernays from the nineteen fiftys. It was called 'The engineering of consent'. It focused on public relations at the start of the twentieth century. Edward Bernays is known for being the founder of public relations as we know it. For his whole career he critically evaluated the publics views on advertising, propaganda and social patterns and pioneered public relations as a subject to be taught at universities. 

His essay evaluates the expansion of communication due to progression in the ways ideas could be broadcast. By the fifties everybody had a radio. newspapers were easily available and advertising space was much more available. 'The United States has become a small room where every whisper is magnified thousands of times' 


At the start of the essay Bernays talks about how the world is connected by a web of communication. 'This web of communications, some- times duplicating, crisscrossing, and overlapping, is a condition of fact, not theory. We must recognize the significance of modern communications not only as a highly organized mechanical web but as a potent force for social good or possible evil. We can determine whether this network shall be employed to its greatest extent for sound social ends.' I find this very interesting for it comes from a man fifty years ago who has described the internet of today 'social good or possible evil'.

I also read another journal of his which is titled 'propaganda' the parts i looked at talked about the regimentation of public opinion. Bernays states that it is impossible for man to make ethical, political and economical decisions by himself.

'In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to it attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea'

Bernays' claims that propaganda is not as demonising as it was at the height of world war two. 'Propaganda makes the world safe for democracy' Propaganda is advertising to a group with the same stance in a community. Even though Propaganda was seen as a weapon in World war two for its manipulative and jingoistic capabilities, it is in its original use, neutral. It has, right up to the modern day been used as a tool for public health reccomendations  and to encourage people to participate in census. Even today political parties use forms of propaganda for public manipulation. does this necessarily mean its demonising?

The One Day Brief.

this week we did a project in large groups and the brief was to create a campaign that encouraged woman to send men to the doctors more often, even for minor symptoms of problems.  This was the first time we worked in groups of more than four people. We infact had around twenty people in this group to complete the brief. the idea was to work in smaller teams within the group to gather different information on the subject. I decided to make a team that set questions to ask the public. We made a set of questions so that we could interview people. They were leant towards men and asked such things as- 'how often do you visit the doctor?' and 'when was the last time you visited the doctor?'  These sorts of questions proved very hard to ask. I found it difficult to ask the public, especially men of my age, about their views on the doctors. I found that asking men to complete  the questions as a survey on paper was easier for me and it gave more time for the men to answer the questions. we interviewed forty groups of people and after around an hour and a half took our research back to the 'table'. We presented our findings but i found that it seemed to be overpowered by the work of the researchers who had found out the hard facts online about men visiting the doctors.

The day before this project we were lectured on the importance of splitting large groups into more manageable groups of people because this is how advertising agencies work. They start with bosses, researchers, developers and creatives. I feel this structure definitely wasn't visible amongst our large group. We seemed to have about five people in the group who were very good at coming up with ideas but not very good at refining them. A couple of girls took the ideas and gave them direction but never really had the power over the large noisy group to put the ideas on paper. if i had to be honest i played a roll in disagreeing with most of the ideas. I wasn't really given the opportunity to say why though. When it came to presenting our ideas we had a campaign that used superheroes to portray men and the superheroes had to be forced or captured to go to the doctors by their super hero wives. My favourite campaign from the whole day was so simple though- a crap picture of batman with the tagline underneath saying be a hero check your balls. keeping it simple.

Rebranding 'Smash': Module 2

Module 2 seen us propose a rebrand  for a popular dehydrated potato product Smash. The project was done in groups again and we were asked to use interview tools from semester one to gather information on the product. We started  to gather information on the university campus. One of my teammates had set questions to ask the interviwees ranging from- 'what was your favourite childhood meal?' to 'would you ever consider buying smash?' We interviewed roughly six groups of people in a half hour period and noticed that almost all of them were students between the ages of 18-25. For this reason we decided we had to look at a broader range of people within Smashes target market and interview elsewhere. We took our investigation into town an targeted older people who we thought may have tried the product. The people we asked said they had tried smash in an era were ready meals, fast food and instant snack food had become more available and cheaper than fresh produce. slightly of track i know, but, I went to see the comedian Sean Lock last year. One of his jokes was about the kind of rubbish he ate as he was growing up in the seventies. He joked that he lived off a strict diet of mince and orange squash. So he always ran around hyper fuelled by the e numbers in his squash for the first ten years of his life. I kind of got this image from the older people i asked- 'oh.. smash used to taste so much better in the old days; probably because of all the crap it was made with'. Sean Lock was right then. 

So after we'd asked another 15 groups of people in town I headed home and made up my sachet of smash then abruptly binned it; a horrible gloopy mess i did not enjoy eating. I still persisted after lunch and we sat down to discuss the kind of people who were intrested in the product. We had to create model personas; a kind of persona that summarised the kind of people we had interviewed. We made three personas. we felt our best one was based on a woman called 'Brenda' she was retired and used smash as an ingredient for other recipes and occasionally as a side for main meals. we couldn't really see, from the information we'd gathered, smash being a product you'd buy solely to eat on it own.