Two and a half years ago Dan and his partners set up a small brand consultancy in Soho, London. They’ve grown to 24 people and they work with clients like BMW, 3, AOL, Carphone Warehouse, Heinz and Vertu and yet they don’t even have a logo (they have about 12).
Dan, what’s Dave all about?
We like to say we’re creative problem solvers – we work the whole 360 degree brand experience – across every touch point for Sales, Marketing, HR, Brand and Business. Much of our work is internal, working with staff and teams. You’d fit us somewhere between management consultancies and traditional agencies. We offer creative solutions to business problems.
Quite often those business problems have been created by previous agencies. People know us for building brands from the inside out so we’re getting asked more and more to fix work done by the big brand consultancies. Usually it’s a big ‘rebranding programme’ that has only delivered a change in identity… not understanding, energy or belief.
Tell me about the team here.
We don’t hire from our competitors. They come from clients, manaqement consultancies, architecture, interior design and all over the place. It’s far better that you hire staff who get ‘it’ – are smart, energetic and want stuff done – than come from our business. It’s easier to teach process that ever make someone get ‘it’.
There’s a lot of motivation here – and we all want to create a great place to work.
We recently spoke to Niku Banaie at Naked – would you say you guys sound very similar?
We really like what Naked do, and they’re friends of us – but what they do best is understand the consumer and create communications between brands and that consumer, we’re more internal – we understand the business and create solutions.
We often work with Commercial Directors rather than Marketing Directors – we work best when the company gets the idea that it’s a collective, that the brand works through all functions. All too often companies are split into different units – a divide and conquer approach – with separate budgets – it’s hard for them to implement brand development.
Tell me about a couple of projects that reflect your approach.
A brilliant planner at CHI came up with a proposition for British Gas: “Do The Right Thing” – it’s a brand promise about providing service that meets expectations for customers – and a whole raft of advertising was created around it.
British Gas hedged their 5 year corporate strategy on this. The small problem was that they hadn’t informed the 27,000 staff who actually were supposed to be carrying out this promise. British Gas didn’t think sitting them all in the room and playing them the commercial (like many organizations do) would really meet what they wanted to achieve – so they hired us.
As you’d expect Dave went in to bring the promise to life within the organization.
First, we went on a three week immersion, sat with the call centers went out with the drivers etc and took in the culture. We listened hard to staff and came back with a ‘State Of The nation’ report on the company. We knew there was a wide audience – call centre operators, drivers, engineers, salespeople, even debt collectors, but we found people weren’t exactly loyal to the brand: staff were loyal to their team first, the floor on their office next, their building and then the brand.
And in the past whenever a marketing announcement was made, staff expected a different campaign with a different message to roll out in 6 months time.
So what did you actually do?
As part of our wider programme we created a internal communications campaign to give the proposition relevance to their individual jobs – what ‘doing the right thing’ meant personally to them. We gave it a common language so it became a call to action and a context for their everyday working lives.
We did all sorts of things. We produced life size decals and posters of actual customers and their comments, good or bad, that were placed all over the office environment. We created staff stationery notepads that had simple messages preprinted to appear like handwritten scribbles throughout. We created visual representations to bring their values to life in a way that had universal understanding and clear meaning rather than being just a buzzword. We did the same with the financials.
And there’s a lot of ‘doing the right thing’ stuff that the company already does that wasn’t being communicated to all staff – like the fact that a tree is planted for every 100 customers that change to paperless billing. So far they’ve planted over 10,000 trees.
But it was the listening that was most important – and our immersion exercise to understand the business is now an induction programme for new management.
That’s really interesting. Tell me also about all that commotion you caused at Seven Dials too.
Ah, that was for First Direct. First Direct was considered as the Best Bank in Britain – but despite this only 1 million people banked with them. They wanted to be more famous but for the budget all they offered was the equivalent price of half a page advertising in London’s Evening Standard.
Inspired by the launch of their Off-Set mortgage, we decided to hold a one day promotion in London’s Seven Dials where we created a deal with all the retailers – anyone showing their First Direct cards would get something free or discounted.
Although it was a recruitment campaign, we sent text messages to a database of London customers. Thousands came to the event. We also got 15,000 calls in the first day. 80% of them were non First Direct. Press picked up on it and we got a lot of coverage too.
And how many pies?
Lots… the retailers gave away 2,500 items – including pies, flowers, haircuts, T Shirts, pints, cheese, haircuts, CDs, maglites, books flowers and copies of the Evening Standard.
The result was a 10 times greater call center response than they get from a single half page newspaper advert. So the client was very happy.
From what we learned, we created a model that was replicated in other cities. We were mobbed, and what we also learned was that flowers were as good as incentive as a 30 or 40 pound hair cut.
But bigger than that, there was also one very important lesson because as First Direct has no branches, no staff ever meet customers face to face – and we involved the staff who normally work head office so usually never even talk to customers. They came down and learned something that in all their database profile they couldn’t learn. They sat down with them at the end of the day – with their customers as they ate their pies, waved their flowers, drank their pints (and even toasted First Direct!) – and realize that they were actually a very smart bunch of people – clever, intelligent, articulate – an insight which they took home, shared amongst their organization and then spurred on the roll out of this scheme.
Let’s say someone involved in marketing or branding reads this interview and already has an agency of record working with them. How could they encourage their agency to think different?
Ask your agency what they could do different for the price of that half page in the Seattle PI. You don’t need to see it as a risk – if you have 50 media buys, just take one of them and ask your agency to get better results with that fraction of the spend.
Final question, and I’m sorry, but I have to ask: Why ‘Dave’?
That’s a frequently asked question. We wanted something personal but wanted to buck our industry precedent of using surnames that make you sound like a law firm. And we also wanted to create our own approachable brand so it needed to be grounded and common. Dave was the most common name on the phone list at the agency we worked at before we set up the company.
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