Session 5: What’s Your Story?

I think my feelings to starting the business week for Part 2 were very similar to how I started Part 1: overwhelming. While I do want to go into business of course and really enjoy the content, I think the pressure of knowing this is my pathway that I HAVE to show promise in can be quite daunting. Nonetheless, I did quite enjoy today’s session on branding.

Watching the videos we were given before class, I was interested to learn about how such straightforward elements like colour and letters could be branded in such a way that one could immediately recognise a company from it. Even just watching the video, despite them not mentioning any brand names, I was able to recognise almost all of them! I think it definitely emphasises how crucial branding is for an organisation to a consumer, even on a subconscious level.

To begin the session, we looked at SWOT analysis. As I mentioned in the post-formative SDS blog post, I have heard and done SWOT before, but this was definitely a good way to refresh myself on the method and identify it within different brands I hadn’t worked on before. For the group activity, I felt I worked quite well with the two girls in my group and we came up with some solid ideas that were original and thoughtful. We also had ASOS as our brand, which is a brand I’m fairly familiar with.

Taking a closer look into branding, I was fascinated by the use of storytelling within branding and the importance of brand values in connecting with the consumer. Our tutor gave us examples of Leon’s (where a fraud family was established as part of their branding) and Lush, whose environmental and ethical values are one of the main things that draw consumers in. We then had a fun task to create our own branding ideas from scratch off a plain product. I think this task showed me how branding can make such a difference to a product, as we transformed ordinary items like perfumes and shoes and gave them a purpose and value. I feel like my ideas for this task weren’t the most original, but I look forward to developing more ideas for my own range later in the SDS, as I feel my inspirational connection to my own range will result in better branding outcomes.

For the moment, while I understand the SDS, I plan on waiting to begin it until after our second business session on Wednesday. This is so I can have all the information I need before I begin, and can then use the end of the week to get everything done, ideally by next Monday so I have time to make adjustments and show my work during my business tutorial to Sarah. I also believe the next session is going to be quite intense and creative, so I’m looking forward to see what outcomes I’m going to produce.

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