Ceefax switched off on Tuesday night which made me feel a little sad and nostalgic – perhaps because I grew in the 90’s with my Dad watching Ceefax for several hours every Saturday afternoon waiting for the Bolton Wanderers football scores to flash up… It seems that many of us have nostalgic memories of Ceefax – my boyfriend remembers screaming at Ceefax for several hours watching the 1995 Kent vs. Essex cricket league match score refresh every 30 seconds… my nan and granddad used it for weather updates… and below several members of The Value Engineers share their most favourite memories…

‘Ceefax has always been about Saturday afternoon watching the football scores drop in. Throughout the 80s that’s all me and my friends did.’ – Richie Heron

My abiding memory of Ceefax is looking for holidays with my parents, and then waiting with baited breath for my dad to get off the phone to see where we were off to! (Usually a caravan in Wales…). We also used Ceefax for TV listings, a market which has changed significantly over time – with socially-integrated, personalised online listings, all other forms of listing are suffering. The likes of Radio Times in print are now positioning themselves as listings-plus, with exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes and expert reviews.

And the craziest thing is that I sat for hours playing the quiz game Bamboozle – the pages took ages to load and if you got a question wrong you had to go back to the beginning. I guess as the world has sped up we have less time for these things…phone apps that do a lot of what Ceefax did allow us to check listings, look at sports scores etc. on the go – we can, and expect to be able to, multitask a lot more…. – Emma Barker

‘My memory is in the 80′s watching my uncle using Ceefax to scroll through lists of cheap last minute holidays…..then calling up to always find they had sold out…an early model for Last Minute .com perhaps!’ – Ken Wright

I’m sad about Ceefax going! I used to use it as a TV guide but it took forever waiting for the numbers to tick round and then you had to wait ages for it to get to the time of day you wanted to look at then start all over again with another channel. I can actually remember having a TV (we only had one at home) which didn’t have teletext at all. My friends at school used to play a quiz game on there, using the 4 coloured buttons and I thought I was massively missing out! – Rebecca Cook

‘Used to love watching the football scores update at my granddads place.’ – Will Butterworth

Cee you later Ceefax, we will cherish the memories!

Back in February we wrote a blog about the new Tesco ‘Venture brand’ Chokablok (courtesy of Liana) – the idea behind the venture brands strategy is for Tesco to develop exclusive brands and products that don’t carry the Tesco name. It seems logical – Tesco are struggling to get more customers into the store so the alternative is to try and occupy more of their customers spend when they do visit.

The latest addition to the venture brand strategy is the snack brand called Llama’s – a baked bite in the shape of a Llama and the brand execution centres on the personality of a South American llama character. As we saw with Chokablok, these venture brands are designed to be really innovative to give shoppers a good reason to buy them over competitors … and Llama’s certainly delivers on that!

The brand is quirky, different and a bit silly, apparently targeted at men because it is ‘big on taste, and low on patience’. Visiting the website I’m presented with a Llama asking me: ‘What is it with you British and boring snacks? Where I come from in South America, nibbles have some big kahunas!’ and asked to ‘join the heard’ on Facebook. At the moment the Facebook page boasts a measly 74 likes (and one of those is me) but word of mouth through social media feels like a great way to go to build brand presence (a la Kit Kat chunky flavour campaign) – The brand has great potential so let’s hope its social media activity gains momentum and rids the world of boring snacks!

On reading the story that Kellogg’s acquired Pringles my initial reaction was; why would Kellogg’s, who are increasingly communicating the importance of healthy living, acquire a brand that is the other end of the spectrum? Health even has its own section on the Kellogg’s website and the association with the Governments Change4Life initiative is clearly displayed:

‘Because nothing’s more important in life than your health and wellbeing, we’ve teamed up with the Government’s Change4Life initiative to promote a balance of eating well, being more active and therefore living longer’ (http://www.kelloggs.co.uk/health/)

With consumers becoming increasingly savvy about what actually constitutes a healthy breakfast (low carbohydrate, high protein and fresh nutritious ingredients), we can assume that the threat to cereals ‘healthy’ perceptions will only increase …and for Kellogg’s, the acquisition of the Pringles brand surely won’t help with this perception?

However, if we look more broadly than the need for health, the acquisition of Pringles does start to make a lot more sense. Kellogg’s currently dominate the morning and daytime snacking occasions with their broad range of cereals and cereal bars. Strategically for Kellogg’s, Pringles takes them into a new category and new occasions. Pringles are for sharing, particularly centred round more afternoon/ evening occasions and more occasional than their current brand portfolio (which is much more habitual) – ultimately resulting in (almost) completely incremental growth for Kellogg’s. They also sit well together in terms of targeting a similar demographic of mainstream families, not particularly budget but not premium either.

I suppose the ultimate question therefore, is whether this acquisition will taint consumer perceptions of either brand… and having asked around my ‘non-marketing’ friends, Kellogg’s and Pringles are currently perceived as completely separate brands and as long as this continues the fact that they are owned by the same company won’t be widely acknowledged by the general public and therefore won’t actually make a difference to consumer perceptions.

This Christmas, in between eating, seeing friends and general merriment, I held a brand positioning and identity workshop for my brother and sister’s personal training business, born2move. A bit geeky for a holiday I know, but it was great to be able to repay the favour after years of receiving fitness and nutrition tips that have moulded me into the health freak I am today…
The message we want to get across is that born2move are a bunch of personal trainers, yes, but they are so much more, ultimately helping their clients to ‘live their life in the body they want’ through fitness, nutrition, lifestyle coaching and more.
The workshop included customer, competitor and born2move brand analysis before splitting into teams to write up the brand positioning. Following this we spent some time discussing the brand identity, specifically the logo, graphic devices, primary colours and secondary colours, and finished the session brainstorming the various customer ‘touch points’ and where we would execute the identity.
With the positioning workshop complete we’ve put together a brand book and feel really excited about the brand and where we want it to go. We are hopefully on our way to building a relevant, motivating, consistent, credible and durable brand identity.
The Personal training studio is opening later this year so watch this space!

It was early on Saturday morning when my boyfriend and I were watching the England vs. Scotland world cup game. It wasn’t a great game so during the half time break we were a little frustrated about the performance until the ‘Get up for England with O2’ advert came on. A normal England supporter’s alarm goes off in the early hours of the morning and feeling a little drowsy the England Rugby team physically help him get out of bed, put on his England shirt and cook his breakfast in time for the game, leaving the wife in bed.

It was the best England had performed all morning! My other half’s eyes lit up: the most brilliant advert he had ever seen, really capturing the reality many men are facing, waking up early to catch the game. He even declared that when his phone contract expires he is going to change to O2.

Amazing! This is exactly the emotion O2 wanted to provoke… however what they failed to realise was the flip side to having such a strongly emotive advert. What were the Scotland supporters going to think? One Scottish supporter responded that the advert has managed to alienate every Scottish O2 user from O2 by showing it during the England vs. Scotland match: ‘Totally insane marketing by O2. I am due to renew my O2 mobile contracts so rest assured it won’t be with O2. Stupid stupid stupid O2.’

While it is such a great advert in that it elicits strong positive emotions among England fans, the timing of its broadcast has also run the risk of alienating those that aren’t. Shame.