First, you could smell like a “Hog” (if you so wanted) as Harley Davidson stretched its brand. Now, you can smell of old (but very glamorous) shoes if you so want!

Jimmy Choo has followed in the “footsteps” (sorry!) of many other designer brands and stretched itself from fashion to fragrance.

They describe their fragrance  as expressing “An aura of strength and beauty. Glamorous in attitude, confident, intelligent and with a sense of fashion and fun, the fragrance is a modern Fruity Chypre with warm, rich, woody depths. It’s a fragrance inspired by modern women - strong, empowered, beautiful, seductive and alluring with a hidden and mysterious sense of confident sexuality”

Which, if the fragrance is as true to the brand as it should be, tells you want they think their brand is all about.

Over the past months, some of our engineers have been marrying their love of rugby with their creative flair to support UK charity, Help the Heroes. The Value Engineers are one of the proud sponsors of Old Leamingtonians RFC Rugby for Heroes, a weekend of sport, music and fun for all the family kicking off on14^th May. All profits generated from the festival will be donated to Help for Heroes, a charity offering support to British soldiers wounded in current conflicts.

We have had a lot fun developing and creating the artwork below, which will feature in the match programme and on the pitch-side advertising boards.

Michael Vallance, MD and Global Head of Worldlink Payment Services at Citi and a committed supporter of Help for Heroes said: “We are very grateful to The Value Engineers for their outstanding creative input to this event and for ‘Helping our Heroes’.”

“The Old Leamingtonians RFC Rugby for Heroes Festival, supporting the Help for Heroes charity, is not just a one off, ‘fashionable’ event – long term support is required from our Nation for those who put themselves at daily risk of making the ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’ or who bear long term reminders of their service”

Please click here for more information about the festival.

We often take it for granted when we refer to a ‘brand’ that we all mean the same thing when we use the word.  Sometimes, however, it is useful to return back to basics and remind ourselves of the power of a really simple definition.

We believe that a ‘brand’ is more than a just a logo and is more than just an advertising campaign… a ‘brand’ is the total customer experience with a company across all of its touchpoints, as a result of buying and using the products and services sold and operated under the brand name. So, the brand name represents the overall promise of a certain experience which a company makes to its customers.

How would you describe your brand’s promise of a customer experience across all of its touchpoints? We can help you define this promise to help make your customers’ experience even more powerful than it is already and truly differentiated from the competition.

•  ‘Interactions with brands are sources of experience, experiences which influence consumer attitudes’ – P. Gomy / F. Casellas
• ‘The only source of knowledge is experience’ – Albert Einstein
• “A brand is a living entity – and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures” – Michael Eisner, CEO Disney
• “What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children” – William Blake
• “Every detail…image…shadow…placements…contributes to the user’s associations and judgements about the company they are dealing with” – Shawn Borsky

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

2011 sees The Value Engineers celebrate its 25th anniversary. As an homage to the branding world which has been our life for the last quarter of a century, we will be posting a blog on the 25th of every month, discussing everything ’25′.

This month, Peter Osborne, ex Sales and Marketing Manager at Marlow Foods, thinks back to 1986: to the launch of Quorn and to his very first experiences working with The Value Engineers.

If offered fungal biomass with albumen binder on a menu most would opt for the rack of lamb or vegetable curry.  This was, effectively, the challenge posed by the discovery of myco-protein by RHM. – probably the first really new food since the potato with a remarkably unappetising name and scientific pedigree. As the Marketing Manager handed this ‘exciting challenge’ I knew I needed help and turned to The Creative Business, a London agency brimming with intellect and originality. I was lucky! The enthusiastic and very persuasive Planning Director was Paul Walton. Only weeks later Paul left TCB to found The Value Engineers and, showing amazing judgement, I followed with my ‘exciting challenge’. 

We had to find a way to excite people about this new food in an appetising way whilst remaining true to the science and origins of myco-protein. We had to overcome the natural reluctance of most to try anything totally alien. And above all we had to make myco-protein special and memorable. As an alternative to meat, it would have been all too easy to drift into the cheap soya substitute cul-de-sac. The good news was that myco-protein tasted great and was really healthy.

The entire team at The Value Engineers, Paul, Elaine and Helly expended endless perspiration and inspiration on the positioning, the branding and the strategies to break through the natural consumer and trade resistance.

Myco-protein become one of only very few branded ingredients, Quorn.  Sainsbury’s were persuaded to bake it in a pie and Tesco in ready meals.

Are you sure it’s not meat? One of the first adverts for Sainsbury’s Quorn Pies:

Marketing Week takes an interest in the rise and rise of Quorn:

Now, over 25 years later, Quorn is a household name and an international £200m brand. The strategic thinking and creativity provided by Paul and his colleagues at The Value Engineers were the solid foundation for this unique success story.

We are proud to announce that our very own Alex Waters, president for North America at The Value Engineers has been published in the comments section of Pitchcreative.

Alex takes an eagle-eyed view of US trends that are likely to affect the UK. “I have just arrived on the US side of the Atlantic and I am seeing a whole new world with fresh eyes. It seems that there is more new product activity than anywhere else on earth and much of it flows over the water to the UK.”

Click here to download a pdf version of the article.