The Story Of The Brand

Waiting for Snedden Campbell to produce a new website and branding is a bit like waiting for a comet take a trip close to the sun.

You know that it’s going to happen at some point you just can’t tell when or how spectacular the resulting show will be.

It was a challenging design brief to put together – there aren’t many international retained search consultancies working exclusively in medical technology based in Callander.

In fact on review there aren’t any apart from us.
In fact on review there’s only a handful of us in Europe.
That meant that there was nobody we could blatantly copy.
That said, as we’ve found before, we’re pretty good at defining what we aren’t.
Turns out that basing a brief on what you don’t want to be makes life difficult for whoever has to produce the finished article.

Conversations would go something like:
Me: “We don’t want to be grey”
Designer: “How about orange then?”
Me: “That’ll look terrible”
Designer: “Yeah, but it’s not grey is it?”
And so on for hours…

Eventually we narrowed it down:

• Whatever we looked like we didn’t want to look or sound like anyone else – we have our own voice – we should use it.
• Nobody wants to see pictures of us in edgy black and white with our ties daringly cast aside – they especially don’t want to see all of us looking uncomfortable in a group photograph
• People would pay good money not to see pictures of me on a bike/swimming/up a hill – or indeed swimming up a hill even though its a neat trick
• We can publish case studies/blogs but the nature of the job is that we can’t talk about current projects or say much about our clients – unless they ask us to of course
• Publishing more than a few words about how clever we are may boost our egos but is sensationally dull
• Motivational quotes should only be used ironically
• We’re based in the Scottish Highlands – this is much better than being based anywhere else so we really should lay that on with a trowel
• We should at least try and produce a site that people want to look at from time to time to see what we’re up to
• The first meetings with our long suffering friends at the Shine Agency were in January and here we are at the summer solstice. It was worth the wait though…