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“Dartington Crystal is a well-respected brand within the UK and subsequently we needed to be very careful when approaching a re-brand so as not to lose any of the existing equity. Chalk + Ward were the perfect partners to help us with this as they understand the importance of getting the strategy right first. They carried out an audience profiling exercise to help us understand more about our customers and then led a Core Values workshop in which we identified the values at the heart of the business. Only then did they approach the logo and they were careful to keep the history alive whilst evolving it enough to help us take the brand to the next level. We’re very happy with the result and are looking forward to seeing the effects our new branding and packaging will have in the marketplace.”
Dartington Crystal is the only UK manufacturer of handcrafted glassware and crystal products. Established in 1967 they have always kept ahead of the trends and they create contemporary, aspirational designs to the highest quality. As a coveted, desirable brand, their products are hugely ‘giftable’ and can also come with personalisation for that extra special touch. As well as supplying retail stores throughout the UK and export markets, Dartington also supplies many leading businesses and luxury brands with bespoke and exclusive products, some of which can be seen at their award-winning Visitor Centre in Devon.
Chalk + Ward was appointed in 2018 to manage their digital marketing, which has seen great results. For more information, please see our digital case study. During the process of working on their digital marketing strategy, we identified a need for the client to have a deeper understanding of their target audience and to bring more personality into the brand. The credibility and quality of the brand have never been in question, but we challenged whether consumers were still clear on what it stood for in the market.
Mosaic is Experian’s most comprehensive cross-channel consumer classification. Over 850 million pieces of information across 450 different data points are condensed to identify 15 summary groups and 66 detailed types – it’s robust!
Chalk + Ward recommended this process to allow us to get deeper insights on consumer lifestyles and behaviour to help make more informed marketing decisions. We profiled over 46,000 Dartington customer postcodes, which gave us the relevant ‘groups’ and ‘types’ that the audience can be segmented into. The profiles were run against both the customer base and the order value to determine the overall customer demographics and the demographics of those that spend the most. These profiles were then overlaid to the whole of the UK giving each postal sector an index score which indicated its propensity to contain the customer that we want to target.
The results were very clear for Dartington with only 4 Groups and 18 Types indexing over the 100 average and they gave us the focus we needed to understand more about factors such as age, income, social grade, working status, media consumption and geography. We also created heat maps of the UK demonstrating where the highest propensity of our audience live, mapped by both orders and order value. This was all invaluable information for the client and for Chalk + Ward as it allowed us to review the brand positioning and make tangible marketing decisions off the back of it.
To develop the Dartington brand positioning in the light of the audience segmentation work, Chalk + Ward carried out one of our proprietary Core Values workshops. This is a collaborative session with key drivers and influencers from all areas of the business in which we explore different areas – including target audience and competition – to create the two or three words that are truly at the heart, or core, of the business and brand. Understanding your Core Values is key to building a consistent brand, as they are the glue that hold everything together; they are the heartbeat of the company as they define who and what you are, so that everyone within the business can understand it and use them to guide decision making throughout the organisation.
The values are also important for driving the culture of a business and helping your staff get behind the brand and understand the future vision. As part of the workshop, we therefore also look at what the values mean to different departments and plan what they’re going to do differently to bring them to life and make a contribution to driving the business forward. This provides something tangible to take away and develop further internally. The session was incredibly useful for Dartington Crystal and the subsequent opportunities for building a more powerful brand are enormous.
To this day, we still add an incredible amount of value through our strategic business and marketing consultation, working closer than ever to drive business growth.
The Dartington logo has a lot of history but it’s still important to keep a brand looking fresh and evolving it over time. You may think that the big brands never change, but if you look at the Coca Cola logo for example, it’s now very different from the original and you can see how it’s been tweaked and amended, bit by bit, over the years.
It was important to keep the brand recognisable, so we weren’t looking to change it from being white on black or look to change the format in any way. We explored different fonts, the shape around the graphic ‘D’, removing the ‘D’ from any holding shape and changing the ‘D’ so it became more of a graphic symbol.
Chalk + Ward presented many different options for the logo and talked through the story of the evolution. After a few slight amends, the client chose their final option which gave them a more modern font and a bolder, more confident ‘D’ which wasn’t contained and could stand alone as a graphic and be used on different media.
