The Creative Process of Brand Building: Connecting Consumers & Companies through Stories

1. Trailer: Hi. I'm Stanley Hainsworth, and I'm here in Seattle, Washington. I ended up here after 12 years of Nike, four years of Lego in Denmark, and then I took a job here in Seattle for Starbucks. Then, six years ago, I left to start my own agency, Tether right here. When I started Tether, I always wanted this creative playground. We could bring any idea that you could think of to life. For this class, we're going to be choosing a product that you really love that you think could use some help. So it needs some rebranding, and it needs a story. It needs a foundation. First thing we're going to do is assess the landscape. What else is out there like them. What's the competitive set like. What are the opportunities. What is the story of that brand. So what is unique about that brand, and we're going to look at the positioning of that brand. The mission, and the promise and the brand characteristics. So you think of a brand as a person. And then after that, we're going to look at the visual execution of that brand that comes out of that positioning and that brand story. Then, we'll talk about how to work successfully with your client, and a little bit on the presentation and then we'll look at some of the results that you can get. This class is for any creative, or writer, designer, marketer who wants to really create a bigger impact when their problem-solving through design and learn how to create that emotional connection between a brand and a product and how to do that successfully working with your client. If I was a bit energetic, it's the fault of Awake chocolate found at your local supermarket and drug. Okay. 2. Introduction: Hi, I'm Stan Lee Haynsworth, and I'm here in Seattle Washington. I ended up here, after 12 years at Nike, four years at lego in Denmark, and then, I took a job here in Seattle for Starbucks. Then six years ago, I left to start my own agency Tether, right here. When I started tether, I always wanted this creative playground. Where you could bring any idea that you could think of to life. We have all the disciplines represented here. We do interactive, branding, packaging, video, advertising, social media, you name it. We have a 3D printer, we have a letterpress, we have video editing suites. Whatever we can think of, we can bring to life through those disciplines. We wanted to be able to do that, in order to tell stories for the brands that we work with. Think of naming your own company. It's daunting, it's like naming a child. So, I wanted to name the spoke to that emotional connection between a consumer and a brand. Because, when I started thinking about it, what was I really good at? What did I learned how to do over 20 years at Nike, Lego, and Starbucks. It was about telling stories and creating that emotional connection, between consumers and brands. I've found this name tether. That spoke to that pretty well. So tethering, of the two of a brand and a consumer. You have that tether, because you craft this love story between consumers and brands. Whenever you encounter a brand it's like a date. You first look at something a packaging, a website, a product, and you look at it and say, "Do I want to date this thing or do I want to take this home with me" Then, if it delivers on the promise, then you develop a longer lasting relationship with it, it is an emotional connection with that brand. I had this moment, one day at Starbucks. I was working there, I was the head of creative at Starbucks and I spent the whole day doing this. I guess what creative directors do, reviewing work all day long and, and moving from one project to the next. At the end of that long day, I was sitting in the studio there just, worn out and very happy and I realized that, I'm really good at this. Then I thought, well, what do you mean? That's both egotistical to say that and also what is it that you're good at? So that's one of the first times I really had to think about what is it that I'm good at. That's what I came up with was, I'm good at telling stories and creating that emotional connection between consumers and brands. So, and you know, I worked as an actor for 10 years before I ever got into this profession. So, it really is about that storytelling and creating that emotional connection. That's why I do what I do, because this is all I've ever done, and all I know how to do is tell stories and as designers as creatives we have incredible mediums through which tell those stories now. I've always approached everything I have with this natural ignorance. Since I'm not a trained designer, I learned on the job. I don't pretend like I know something and I don't know it, of course. But also even if I think I know it, I looked to learn from everyone that I come in contact with. So that is whether it's a marketing person, a salesperson, a lawyer. Whoever it is, I see what I can learn from them, and then I put all that toward what I do. Toward branding and creativity. I think that's what's helped me, as I've gone through my career, Nike, Lego, Starbucks, and tether. I've always looked to people as mentors, and how I can learn from them. For this class, we're going to be choosing a product that you really love, but that you think could use some help. So, it needs some real branding, and it needs a story, it needs a foundation. So, that's what we're going to be doing for this class. Picking a brand that you're passionate about, and rebranding it through storytelling. For design is, problem solving. It's, a business need, needs to creative challenge. So our client has a business need and they come to us, and they want to sell something. They want the consumer to buy more of something, they want them to join something. If it's a non-profit, and so it's problem solving. So, we come up with the creative vision for that, and that goes up against the business need. Those two sometimes there's tension there. That's where the problem-solving comes into play. So it says, natural tension between the two, until you align, and you come up with something that looks really great. we'll create that emotional connection, and it also solves that, that business name, that the client has. So, design is problem solving. Design is about storytelling, by that I mean that, every brand started for some reason. Somebody had a reason for starting a car company, or a guitar company, or a device company. They had a passion or they saw a need in the marketplace. So whether, it's 100-year-old brand, or it's a one-day-year-old brand, there's a passion there's a story there. So, as designers a lot of times, if it's an older brand, we have to reclaim that story, find what was there in the first place, and make it relevant. Then if it's a startup, we have to create that story for them. I wonder a long time in my career that design has to have a purpose. I finally was able to articulate it, into this simple little sentence. Design is not decoration. That's something that I always stressed with all the designers that I worked with is, why is it that they're, like why is there that, that color there, that graphic element whatever it is? It has to have a reason, it has to tie back to the strategy, has to tie back to who the brand is. It can't just be decoration. Otherwise, you're just an artist and we're not artists as designers, we're designers. There's another little point that I found some of the designers that I work with sometimes get frustrated and they go. You know, the the client just doesn't get it. It's because they were frustrated that they didn't accept their vision. It gets back to what we do as designers as problem-solving. Everything has to have a reason and a purpose, and if you look at design as 100 percent creative fulfillment, you're going to be disappointed. Because that's called Fine Art. That's when you go home and you paint, or your sketch and you can make whatever you want. As designers, we're problem solvers and were partners with our clients and solving those problems. Once you pick a project or a brand to work on, first thing that we're going to do is assess the landscape. What else is out there like them? What's the competitive set like? What are the opportunities? And then, that's the strategy part of it. That's the strategic take on who this brand could be. Then once we've determined that we're going to go into, what is the story of that brand? So what is unique about that brand? What is it that only they can own? We're going to look at the positioning of that brand. That has the mission, and the promise, and the brand characteristics. So you think of a brand as a person. That's what we're going to be working on. Then after that, we're going to look at the visual execution of that brand, that comes out of that positioning in that brand story. Then, we'll talk about how to work successfully with your client, and a little bit on the presentation, and then we'll look at some of the results that you can get. So, this class is for any creative, or writer, designer, marketer, who wants to really create a bigger impact when their problem-solving through design, and learn how to create that emotional connection, between a brand and a product, and how to do that successfully, working with your client. So your assignment, is you need to choose the product that you want to rebrand, research it, and then, explain why in two to three sentences. 3. Brand Story: So, I've chosen as our case study a brand that we've worked on here at tether, and this is a product that needs a story to really create that resonance with the consumer. So, the product is a chocolate bar, it's not just any chocolate bar, it's a caffeinated chocolate bar. So, this chocolate bar equals one cup of coffee, so they amped up, push up the caffeine content. So, they came to us with this product, and they said, "Well, we think it's pretty good like this, maybe a little tweaking or something like that," and we looked at it and go "Okay. Well, where do you want to sell this?" They said "Well, we want to sell it in the chocolate aisle, so it needs to look delicious." So, if you look at this, I'm not sure if it looks delicious, it has this power button here, everything about it screams like energy, it looks like an energy drink. So, we started our explorations around who is the consumer first of all, and who are the competitors out there. We looked and there's of course lots of competitors out there in the chocolate market, and there's everything from M&M's and Twix and Snickers, but this is kind of Twix meets Red Bull, and so we wanted to make sure we hit that consumer in the right place. So, we also looked at the audience, and the audience is really this 18 to 24 year-old male and female,. If you think of that age group, a lot of them are in college, so in university. So, that was a primary target that we started thinking about and looking at. So, once we knew that the competitive landscape of we wanted it to be delicious looking, and sounding, and feeling so all the five senses, but we wanted to clearly scream out, it's differentiator of its caffeinated, its energy, so it's energy chocolate. We're ready to tackle the brand story now. So, now that you've picked your your product that needs rebranding, we're going to create something around that brand that has that emotional connection between the consumer and the brand. The brand story has all those essentials needed to build on to create the visuals, but first we have to get the foundation down, who it is, what it is before we create what it looks like. So, this is much like if you think of a brand as a person. So, as I'm talking to you, you're looking at me and you're looking at, I don't know, my hair, my face, the way I talk, my clothes, and that's part of my brand, and you're judging me or trying to determine what I'm like from that. That's the opportunity that we have with the brand work that we do, the visual characteristics that we assign to the brand, those are the outer elements of a brand. Then the promise and the vision and the brain characteristics are what's on the inside. So, once you get to know the brand, once you take it home and interact with it on the product level, on the social media level, on the advertising level, on the brand level, then it starts coming alive as a brand. So, the first thing is the vision, like what are the founders trying to do with this brand? For this brand, it was really about looking for a sweet tree, but it has this this energy, this kick. So, the vision that we worked on was open your eyes and your mouth to something more satisfying in life, a sweet treat with a kick to boot. So, it's that replacement. If you think about other beverages or food that people take to give them that energy, you think about coffee and tea. So, some people don't want coffee and tea in the morning, afternoon, noon, night, so this is a replacement. So, it's a great afternoon, if you think of afternoon or evening, a great alternative to that coffee, and certainly a good alternative to an energy drink as well. So, that was our initial thoughts on the vision. Then, the mission is really around; what is your business rationale for existing? Our mission that we came up with was to create the category of delicious in caffeinated energy chocolate world. So, we looked at who we're going up against, and we want to make sure we're going up against Cadbury's and Hershey's and everyone else, want to make sure it's delicious, but we also want to make sure that the caffeinated or the energy part is very clear. So, our mission again is to create the category of delicious in the caffeinated energy chocolate world. So, that will guide all of our actions. Next is the promise. The promise is what you promise the consumer every time they come in contact with the brand, and this is more of an emotional thing, it's the emotional reason for being. Like a great example of a promise, when I was the Starbucks, the promise was daily inspiration. So, every encounter with the brand, you promise the customer that you're going to inspire them, in a small way. You're not going to change their lives, but you're going to inspire them in a small way. So, with Awake chocolate, we started exploring what the promise could be, and we looked at lots of different alternatives, but we ended up coming up with this, "Get more out of life." We felt that "Get more out of life" as a brand promise was very appropriate because if you think of the attitude of a caffeinated item like this, well it allows you to get more out of your day because you're able to stay awake and that's what caffeine does. So, you're able to get more out of your life, have more energy in the hours that you are awake, and then stay awake longer as well. So, get more out of life as the the brand promise. Now, the brand characteristics, these are like the personality traits. So, if you look at someone like me as a person, you look at them and you get to know them and they're charming, they're witty, they're engaging, so those are different brand characteristics or personality traits that brand would have. So, for awake, one of them of course was energetic, that's a key one in this, and it's something that you'd expect from a caffeinated brand being energetic, and the fact that we're going to be there to help you anytime. It's also if you think of a chocolate bar it's very convenient, you can take it with you anywhere it, you're not going to spill it, you can throw it in your purse or your bag, and it's also segmented so that you can have part of it, and then have another part of it later. So, energetic is the number one. Number two was helpful, helpful is that we understand what your needs are. So, we're being helpful to your needs, meaning it's convenient. Like I just said, you can't spill it, and it's going to help you do better in your day. Witty, we felt that witty was very important because caffeinated chocolate, what's not fun about that. So, it's got to have this sense of humor, and will have playful banter and engage with our core customer in that way. The next one is encouraging. Now when we find something that's this cool and this fantastic, we want to have that can-do attitude about life, so encouraging. Then positive, we want to always take the high road, we don't want to tear down other brands or other forms, everything has a place. This is just an alternative to other things that you're already taking, and it's not supposed to get rid of everything else in your life, that's the brand characteristics. Then we have the brand guardrails, the who we are and who were not. So, who we are on who the we are side, we're helpful, we're not disengaged, we're positive not negative, we're intelligent not lowbrow, witty but not slapstick. So, this is a list of all the who we are and who we are not, these are our nuances. If you think of the difference between intelligent, lowbrow or witty and slapstick that's a nuance, but it's an understandable nuance, and it's important to have that as a brand. So, once you have all those elements, that's the start of your brand story, so we call that a brand outline. So, you have the outline of what your story is, you don't have all the elements yet, you don't have the visuals, you don't have the name, you don't have all those things, but it's the start of a roadmap or a start of a brand story as the brand outline. Now, on the naming front, not all projects will come with the opportunity to name or rename them, but for this one, we have the opportunity to look at the name. As you saw, it started off with the name awake. So, we looked at lots of options, we have Vyve, V-Y-V-E, Cafficoa like tapioca pronounced like that, but Cafficoa, get it caffeine cafficoa, Reverie, the signal of getting up and going. We have Snap, that sound of that energize chocolate, Lever this lifts you up and keeps you moving, Lixir, is another one like this magical mystical elixir of chocolate, Affection, it effects your energy levels. So, we looked at all these different names, and we decided to also make sure that we had some context around those. A lot of times the client has a hard time just picturing what a name could be without a little visual helps. So, sometimes we'll do it without this visual help, but in this instance, we added some visuals around it. So, it's just simply on the shape of a bar, we just put the name, and we put some graphics behind it. So, it helped them understand what it could look like, and what it could be, and in the end, we ended up with the name Awake. So, we went back to where we started, and we thought maybe we could do better as a name, but we thought in the end, it's just a great name. It says exactly what the promise of the brand is, it will keep you awake, and it was a cheerful and witty, and It had all those those elements. So, we got that email from our clients saying "Hey guys, thanks for the presentation, a lot of intriguing ideas, ultimately we decided to stick with the Awake name, so let's proceed with the design phase, we're excited." So, that happened sometimes and we were excited as well, and we were on board with that. Now, what you need to do is write out your brand story, and do a couple of different variations or options of that. Clients as you know always like to have options. So, do two, three options, and have those options all rooted in who this brand is, your insight from the competitive analysis and the consumer, but have it three different takes on that, and if there is a naming component involved, also come up with at least three name options for this. 4. Visual Execution: So, with the brand story in hand and a name, we're ready to go on to the visual exploration. So, we now have the name AWAKE for this chocolate bar. The first thing that we do is explore a visual language, a broader visual language. There's couple of ways you can do that. One, is to do it in the context of the product itself. So, on the chocolate bar, so think of the shape of the chocolate bar as if the key visual. All the brand elements are on that chocolate bar. That's the way that we approached it for this. So, we did several variations and we looked at everything from the sparkler type to energetic, everything emanating from the A, then we looked at that power of the band going around the chocolate and something a little retro. What was interesting along the way is that we were just designing the packaging for this, but we showed in one of our visuals, the bar itself redesigned. As soon as our clients saw that they said, "Wow, we have to redesign the bar." Before that they said, that wasn't in the scope or there wasn't the opportunity. But we we're able to get them excited about it because they saw the possibilities in what it could look like. We presented three or four options on the how AWAKE could look as a bar. Then we brought it to life through different little mini posters to kind of proof of concept. Here's what a point of purchase could look like, here's what the bar could look like, here's what a mini ad could look like. Then we started really honing in around this one concept, and really the concept came about through this little sketch of this little owl. You can see him right here starting to come to life. Here's another one where he's starting to come to life. If you think about an owl and the possibilities about an owl, what does an owl stand for? Well, stands for staying awake, right? They stay awake all night. So, we love the attitude, this little owl with the big eyes. Then we thought, you know, it's always good to have an icon for a brand, something that you can hang your hat on and so we thought, you know what? That owl could be it. As we were working on this, we found out that our client, the owl one, wasn't their favorite one. They like some of the other ones better and actually quite a bit better. They really didn't like the owl one. So, what we did is we decided to show the possibilities of the owl one. So, we did this little key visual, this little poster, "The early bird can have the worm" and then it shows in a little thought bubble with the owl talking. Now, we gave the owl a name. We had several names to choose from and we ended up with the name Nevil. We thought Nevil was a funny name for now, it's kind of very formal, very English. On that key visual, you'll see that we have the bar, we have crumbled up chocolate next to it so it looks delicious, and then we have the owl. Then we have those graphic elements that are along the top, and then we have him that thought bubble, we have the owl talking. So, those all ended up being all the key elements, those graphic elements. That was really the start of the graphic system. Then as we moved through and we showed the client that, they start getting excited about it. You know in the end? What they did is they trusted us. They said, "We hired you because we know that you're really good at branding and about telling that emotional brand story. So, if you think this is the right way forward, we trust you." So, it was a great partnership in the end. We learned from them on the business side and staying with the name AWAKE and they trusted us on the visual execution. We design the chocolate bar itself, it has Nevil, the owl one and it says AWAKE chocolate on it. In the end, we got down to those details where on the top, the awake type was hand-drawn, but was thin and the client said, "Can we maybe have more shelf pop, can it shout louder on the shelf with a bolder type, hand-drawn type?" So, we split the difference. We showed them something medium in between and they agree that that was a great solution. From that visual solution we created, we're able to have all the elements we needed to create the little, we had this little mini brand book. This is the unofficial guide to being awake. It talks about being awake is not just a state of mind and you go through and you get the sense of who this is for. An official awake ambassador is always prepared and it talks about what this will do for you, one piece and you are one-quarter of awake. You can have a casual conversation with a stranger, walk to the mailbox and back. One of these equals one cup of coffee, so a chocolate bar equals one cup of coffee. So, it had a clear product message in here as well, done in a very fun way. Two pieces, you can take the stairs, you can write a book report or wrestle an under-sized badger. So the attitude, give 3PM the feather and all the things you might miss if you're aren't awake. It just goes through the book like that with that attitude. So, the visual elements reflects who the brand is and the attitude reflects who the brand is. So, that's the little brand book and that was very valuable and it was used internally, and it was used as they went around to retailers, and to convince them that they should carry the product. Then we started creating elements around the brand. Now, this is very important because it's not just the packaging that brings the brand to life, it's everything that happens around the brand. The packaging is the last step and that's that final moment of decision, but somehow you either see it online, hear it from a friend or recommendation, you see it in an ad or you walk through the store and you see a notice or you just see it on the shelf. So, what we did is we started creating everything around it and what it could be. We thought of our consumer. Where does our consumer live, the university student? Well, they live online, that's where they live. So, we thought of a great way to reach them is through social media campaign. So, we created a social media campaign around that with all the elements. So, we're able to do this, we're able to show our client some of the excitement that we could generate around social media. The important thing is to get this in their mouths and get them to try it. We did this college campus tour, we did these T-shirts where you're able to experience the brand, and we gave these out on the college tour. It was called the "Eyes wide open tour" and it went across Canada where we launched the brand. The eyes wide open tour went to college campuses and we had all these little different elements, we had these little notebooks, we had pencils, we had a bus that we painted and it has a big Nevil on it. We had this person dressed up like Nevil going around to these college campuses and sampling the product. We also did a couple of other fun things like we had this contest where you took pictures of people asleep and the more compromising position in which they were asleep, then the more points you got. You are able to earn points to win all this cool stuff like snowboards and skateboards, and bags, and hockey jerseys, and stuff. So, it was a really fun experience creating things that were relevant to this consumer through social media. Nevil the owl, is one of our writers and so he's very active on Twitter. He actually became one of the top five followed tweeters on Twitter in Canada. Nevil the owl, just because he's very active around Movember, we posted things with Nevil with mustaches around the Olympics, around Halloween. So, he's just very relevant in these different occasion. So, that was how we drove excitement around the product and through Nevil, through social media, through online, and then of course in store, we created lots of excitement through the product. Now, we ended up designing the chocolate bar and of course, here's the before and after. So, we moved from this power button, very non-appetizing, but very power or energy oriented, to the one on the bottom here, which looks delicious and it also clearly says caffeinated chocolate, and has the owl, and it has AWAKE. So, between all those, it's telling you what this product is for. So, then we started creating all the physical assets around the brand. First of all, we did it in paper mockups. This is for the many pieces of chocolate like these right here, and we did a paper mockup first as you do to get the client excited about it, what it could look like, and then you move toward the actual printout, and then the actual product itself. We wanted these to be really self-contained little messages because these are many times going to be sold in a grocery, or a convenience, or drugstore, so it needed to be this little ecosystem right here that told you the whole story. So, it has Nevil the owl on it, it says, "Imagine what you're missing if you're not awake" and it has it in two languages. That was another one of the challenges that we had is on both the bar itself, and on the packaging, and on the point of purchase, point of sale items. We needed to have two languages because it was sold both in Canada and in the US. We ended up doing a regular and then we added the caramel chocolate to it and we're working on other flavors right now and then other sizes of it. We thought of one idea where the largest online shopping channel in Canada is shop.ca, and we had Nevil the owl send the owner on vacation and then he took over the site for a week, and he was the curator of the site. So, he picked all the different products that were to be sold on shop.ca. So, that was a great chance for awareness around the brand and we picked up lots of new followers and new fans on that. After looking at this, your challenge for the next time is to design the visual branding system based on the story. So, you have your story in hand, and you just saw me go through the case study of AWAKE, and the visual branding system, and would like to see some activation ideas of how to bring that to life as well. 5. Presenting Your Work: Now that you have created your visual story, the visual elements based on the brand story on the foundation, now you're ready to present this work to your client. The art of working with your client. There's lots of course nuances and skill involved there. A lot of it depends on how you present it and how you show your understanding of the brand, how you bring them along, how you listen to what they said, how you looked at the competitive landscape, how you found white space for them and you know the audience and then you created this brand story, their brand promise, their mission, the brand personality. Then once you explain that really well, the visuals should just kind of come out of that. They should just kind of appear out of that almost because they're almost able to see them before you show them. It's always about referring back to the brief about what the task was because a lot of times the client doesn't know what they want until they see it and we've all had that experience as as designers. So, if you don't help them interpret their likes and desires, it can be a very long process of this showing back and forth. So, we always need to use the brand book as the guide or the mission and the promise and the characteristics. We're going to always go back and show them that we're building on those. Because we've had weeks or days or months to think about this and explore it, they're just seeing it for the first time. So don't be surprised if they need a little time to think about it or they just don't love it immediately because we've had time to fall in love with this. You need to give them that time as well. Also realizing that design is about compromise. Now, sometimes compromises is looked at as a bad word but in this case in design it's not. Compromise is the great marriage between business needs and that creative intent. So, when those two come together, it's a beautiful thing and you sell lots of whatever you're selling. So the client brings that business need together, they want you to bring that creative vision, but they're going to look at it from a business standpoint and from a consumer standpoint and they're going to say, "That doesn't quite work," and so it's not a bad thing when they say something's not working. It's that natural given and take and that compromise and that working together. We never expect to have a home run the very first time. You don't show it to them and then just like, "Great. Love it." That does happen but rarely. It's usually a little bit of this a little bit of that to get to that solution. So, a lot of it is about developing that trust. Them relying on you for that creative vision and that consumer insight on a strategic level and then them bringing that business reality and respecting each other on that. A lot of it is also respecting timelines and deliverables and making sure that you hit and budget. Making sure that you are respectful of those and that goes a long way to creating that trust. Once you start presenting, its always a great idea, very necessary, to create limits to the amount of rounds that you have. So, when you show something, this could be a creative playground for them and they could go on forever making little tweaks here and there. So, up front when you do your statement of work, make sure that you've limited the number of rounds like three rounds is a good number, so that they know that they need to make decisions and each round is very important and they can't just say something on a whim that it needs to be based on the brand story and on the need. So, going back to Awake for a minute, when they came to us they originally thought this was great or thought this was very close. They loved the name, they loved the power button, they like the silver so they liked a lot of those things. We saw a different creative vision. So, when we ended up coming up with this, well they ended up loving this in the end. But it didn't come without compromise. It didn't come without working back and forth trusting each other. We ended up back with the name Awake. They didn't like the owl and the overall look at first but then we talked about the owl, what it could mean for the brand and how it could really be that spokesowl for the brand and we got them excited about all the elements and in the end, they trusted us and we ended up with this. So, your assignment for this segment is to take that visual story that you've created and remember that visual story was based on the brand story and on the consumer insights and landscape. So you take that visual story and then some of those activation ideas like what we talked about for Awake, social media or retail or events or anything that would bring that brand to life and put those together in a compelling presentation to the client. 6. Conclusion: You've presented the work to the client now, how did it go? Hopefully well. That's the fun part going through this whole process, and getting to know the client, and understanding their business needs, and I've always found it so exciting when you enter into a new relationship with the client. Especially, if it's an area that maybe you haven't worked in before like a category they haven't worked in before, whether it's electronics, or health care, or food, or beverage whatever it is. It's very exciting to get to know that category, and get to know the consumer in that category and you'll learn a lot of valuable, learnings and information that you can use with your next client that you work with or you're continuing relationship with this client hopefully. Some of the key lessons that we've found through this, the business goals for Awake, was to really create this new niche of energy in the chocolate category. It's something that a couple of other brands have tried, a couple of big brands like Snickers but they didn't succeed because it didn't taste good because caffeine by itself doesn't taste great. So it needs a really flavorful bar in order for the whole package to taste great. So the product challenge was to create a great tasting bar, so the founders of this company created a great tasting bar. Our job was to make it look great so that you would pick it up and try it and then taste how great it was and feel the effect. We were able to do that as you remember through the look and feel of the chocolate bar itself, and then we wanted to create awareness around this. So the awareness goals were around distribution. So in order to get distribution, they had to get the retailer is excited about the product. So we created some of the assets to create excitement around the product. So we created this little brand book you remember and this brand book was shared with retailers and as well as the different elements like the point cell. All these were created first as mockups to get the retailer excited and then they place those orders. So as far as results, the store distribution has started in Canada and it started out with 1,000 doors or stores and it's grown to over 20,000 in the US and Canada now. The bar itself and the packaging itself has won several awards including the convenience Innovation award, for best chocolate bar and it was ranked one of the top 20 chocolate bars in Canadian grocery drug and mass stores. So between Snickers and twigs it has pretty good. The USA's store distribution is growing rapidly with on college campuses which is where we started and that was the core. That's one of the top three chocolate bars sold in college campuses across North America and now it's in major retailers drugging grocery in the United States. On campus, it's sold more than 2.5 times of any chocolate bar on college campuses. Nevil the Owl as we plan for him to be that spoke sale and prominent element of our brand, he's received lots of media attention. Elle magazine called Nevil the coolest owl emerged since Harry Potter's Hedwig and that was the number five reason that they stated in five reasons we love AWAKE chocolate. So we've gotten major press from Dragon's Den, to Huffington Post, and ABC's the two chuy, etc. This was all through the relationships that we've developed with our client and we've been lucky enough to continue working with them. So we've worked with them for a couple of years now and we have a great time working on this brand, we have a lot of fun with it because they trust us to do what's right for the brand and then we listen to them on their business goals to give the best results for the brand. I think one example that really brings that to life, I was invited to appear with the founders on the Canadian version of Sharks tank which is called Dragon's Den. So we appeared on Dragons Den with the AWAKE chocolate bar and we'll take a little look at a clip from that. Next on our Valentine's special high energy entrepreneurs from saga Ontario who say their line of chocolate will get your heart beating fast. Nice led buddy. Hello Dragons? Matt Schnarr, founder and head of sales. Hello Dragons? Dan Tzotzis as founder and head of supply chain and regulatory. Hello dragons? I'm Stanley Haynsworth, part owner and head of branding and design. My name's Adam Deremo, I'm a co-founder and head of finance and strategy. Our company is AWAKE chocolate and we're here today asking for an investment of $200,000 in exchange for 20% of the business. Our product is quite literally going to re-energize the chocolate industry in North America. Dragons meet AWAKE chocolate. Awake is caffeinated chocolate bar that combines the delicious taste of premium milk chocolate with the pick me up of an energy drink. To put it simply it's KitKat meets Red Bull. One bar of awake chocolate contains about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. I will take one of yours and one of yours. Here you go. Good taste. The chocolate bar cost $2.50 about a dollar less than an energy drink,. This is an alternative to that Red Bull or that coffee. Going to the hair for a second, do you get out of bed have a chocolate and it went, oh, my God! I do what I can with what I have left. I may go there unless it doesn't work in financial services. That's right. So we came up with the name AWAKE and we have the icon you see the owl. Guys, people have tried it before, and the caffeine is left the bad aftertaste. How are you guys getting around that? Who did it before? There's been a couple of the big companies that tried- Snickers did it in 2009, they came out it had we understand, about 90 minutes with the aftertaste. That's the biggest technical complexity that we had to get over. So we have partnered with one of the best in the industry specifically removing the taste of caffeine from the chocolates. All you get is the taste of premium milk chocolate when you're taking it down. My big concern with you guys, how do you get shelf-space? Sure. We've got 3,000 stores already committed. We already got listings at shell, Shoppers Drug Mart, Rexall, Husky- How did you get that? Our selling experience. What is your experience? What is your experience? Yeah, what's your backgrounds? Three of us have worked at both crafted Pepsi. Then you worked at the hair salon. Actually- You are creative. I was creative director at Nike, Lego and Starbucks for 20 years. AWAKE is a great example of something where we've been able to use our cross discipline skills which we as designers all have, and so exciting when you can use everything from branding or positioning, strategy, branding, packaging, social media, video, able to exercise all of these different creative muscles that we have and that's really what tetherers and what excited about for the future of tethers continue with our cross discipline approach to working with brands from advertising, to social media, to video, to environmental, etc. Thanks for following along, was a lot of fun for me and best of luck with the brands that you're working on. Hopefully you'll be able to use some of these skills on your future projects.