Integrated branding is about more than just logos, ads or straight forward promotions. A modern brand is a sum of all the experiences consumers have with that company. By keeping the brands message clear and consistent across the diverse ways a consumer can interact and engage with a brand, it can develop a long lasting relationship with its customers. Increasingly that means embracing branding not just in print and online but with the use of social media, interactive marketing, apps and even augmented reality. The internet has become an integral tool for brand communication, totally changing the way consumers interact with brands. A brand must be as responsive and real-time as any medium through which it is accessed, maintaining visual and conceptual consistency regardless of the type of interaction. In his intriguing essay “Brands As Patterns”, Marc Schillum discusses the need for an evolution of how a brand creates consistency. Schillum recognises that a successful brand must create recognisable patterns - not just visual repetition - by communicating and campaigning in a way that engages directly with their audience. By regularly introducing small, fresh ideas across different mediums a brand can create a pattern in its dialogue with its customers that is as flexible and diverse as the huge number of different ways the brand can be accessed. Modern brands should shift and shimmy their way to their target demographic with a digital joie de vivre, using an integrated, multi-channel understanding of brand/consumer interaction to create campaigns that communicate with consumers in a fresh, exciting and most importantly, engaging way.

In 2009 Burberry was in desperate need of a brand shake up. After sales and consumer interest had tailed off, Christopher Bailey was drafted in to re-invigorate the staid and traditional British brand. That year Burberry launched “The Art of the Trench” - a photo-sharing website that showcased photographs of people sporting Burberry’s iconic trench coat. The site featured images from professional fashion photographers as well as photos of the general public that included contributions from the highly influential street fashion blogger The Sartorialist. Despite featuring professional commissioned photography, the user-generated aspect of the site was the key to its success. Aided by an elegant interface design, visitors who submitted their own images, picked their favourites and shared them with their friends via social networking integration, began to feel as if they were part of the brand itself. The style and image of the brand had integrated perfectly with the style and image of its consumers. In true viral style, the user involvement in the Art of Trench also generated valuable marketing and promotional activity. By mid-2010 The Art of the Trench had already notched up over 7 million visits.

By integrating with interactive digital media and social networking Burberry was able to position itself firmly in the “Web 2.0 world” that was emerging at the time. Burberry’s brand is now able to represent classic British style but also be au fait with the habits of the modern consume

Dunhill’s “Voice” campaign features a series of interviews with notable British gentlemen (such as explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes) talking about their exploits while dressed in some stylish Dunhill attire. “Voice” reflected the values of the brand through its elegant, sophisticated visual style, through the choice of interviewees and the topics discussed. The campaign then crosses the boundary between simple print campaign into the interactive digital realm by employing augmented reality - by holding the printed ad up to an ipad and using Aurasma’s AR Lite app, the image of the printed advertisement springs into life, playing a video interview with the featured famous gentleman as if it was appearing printed on the page. In doing so, Dunhill had used the printed page, moving image and the imaginary space between reality and digital hyperreality simultaneously as its integrated, multichannel campaign that brings the luxury brand to life, capturing the imagination of its target audience and spreading rapidly through online buzz to new customer

For our christmas message we created “Christmas Spirit”. We took the figurative and literal meaning of the name and turned it into a physical and digital multichannel campaign that we hoped would communicate the essence of what we are about as a creative agency. Working with master cocktail magician (and winner of Diageo Reserve’s World Class Bartender 2009 award) Ryan Chetiyawardana we created our very own festively flavoured cocktail. We bottled and sent the cocktail to a select group of clients and friends with a unique URL inscribed on each bottle. The URL took them to a website that featured a personalised message and a short film that captured the making-of process of Christmas Spirit (with a surrealist twist, of course). We wanted our campaign to be a physical brand experience as well as an entertaining digital concept that interacted personally with the user - igniting their interest in Campbell Hay as a creative agency that understands and champions exciting and unusual ideas (as well as giving their taste buds a little tickle)

If the foundation for a successful brand is plurality and pattern through integrated campaigning, then the foundation for creating these patterns is innovative, exciting ideas. The ubiquity of the internet and the rise of mobile-internet offers us almost limitless possibilities for what could be the next exciting idea in integrated, multi-channel branding.

Here’s to the future.