Coes

Coes 2016 – 2022

Through a comprehensive brand development strategy, we successfully delivered coherence across Coes’ family of stores while making their marketing more stand out, efficient and successful. The unified branding not only enhanced brand recognition but also attracted a wider customer base, aligning with Coes’ objectives for growth and expansion.

Challenges:

When we initially partnered with Coes, they lacked formal brand guidance, leading to inconsistency in their visual and verbal communication. Recognising the importance of cohesive branding, we collaborated with them to develop a comprehensive brand and marketing strategy aimed at enhancing unity and brand recognition across all channels.

• Lack of Brand Unity: Coes, along with its subsidiary stores Goddards and Golding, lacked a unified brand identity, causing confusion among customers.
• Inconsistent Messaging: There was a need for clear and consistent messaging across all marketing platforms to effectively convey Coes’ values and direction.
• Visual Identity: There was no synergy across the family of brands.

Strategy:

• Brand Messaging: We defined Coes’ core messaging and identity, ensuring that it was consistently translated across all marketing channels to provide a unified brand experience.
• Visual Identity: While retaining the Coes logo, we synchronised the visual identities of Goddard and Golding to create a cohesive brand family.
• Photography: We implemented a consistent and vibrant style of imagery to personalise the brand and engage customers, utilising lifestyle photography featuring real customers.

Implementation:

• Brand Book: We developed a comprehensive brand book providing design guidelines for applying Coes’ identity across all communications, ensuring consistency and coherence.
• Campaign-Driven Marketing: We created campaign-driven marketing initiatives targeted by customer segmentation, product focus, or seasonality, aligning with Coes’ business objectives and brand values.
• Coes Journal: We introduced the Coes Journal, a quarterly publication informing customers about Coes’ business, values, and family group, projecting the lifestyle they represent.
• Visual Merchandising: With every campaign concept we produced a campaign identity and scheme concept to be implemented in visual merchandising across all Coes’ stores, creating visually appealing displays that showcased their products and reinforced the brand identity and campaign strategy.
• Marketing Collaterals: We redesigned all marketing collaterals to align with Coes’ unified branding guidelines, ensuring consistency in visual identity and messaging.
• Customer Engagement: Our approach aimed to enhance customer engagement through cohesive and visually appealing materials, including store cards (eco-design), e-packaging, point-of-sale materials, advertising, brochures, mailers, catalogues, magazines, and publishing.
• Vanity Publishing: Coes, a third-generation family business founded in 1928, celebrated David Coe’s 60 years with “Reflections of a Shopkeeper,” a commemorative book highlighting the company’s rich history. Collaborating with a copywriter, we delved into Coes’ archives, crafting a compelling narrative that intertwined personal anecdotes and archival materials. Through careful design and layout, including photography and illustrations, we brought the story to life, emphasising Coes’ legacy and commitment to excellence. The book not only honoured David Coe’s contributions but also served as a cornerstone of Coes’ brand identity, fostering pride and connection among employees while showcasing the company’s enduring values to future generations.

Results:

• Strengthened Brand Presence: Coes now boasts a much stronger brand presence with consistent messaging and visual identity across all channels.
• Increased Interest and Customer Base: Coes has experienced a surge of interest both in-store and online since implementing the new branding strategy, with a widened customer demographic, particularly attracting younger customers.
• Efficient and Cost-Effective Marketing: The cohesive branding has made Coes’ marketing efforts more efficient, cost-effective, and successful, resulting in improved brand awareness and equity.

“WHAT from the outset, helped us to look at the DNA of our organisation and have built an advertising strategy based around that. The time and effort reviewing who we are and what we stand for has manifested itself into campaigns that are targeted and have a great resonance with our customer base. Their attention to detail and ability to continually review each piece to ensure it is in keeping with the overall script is outstanding. But most importantly they are a pleasure to work with.”

WILLIAM COE