Creating branding and
communications that work for clients is one of the reasons we do what we do. Of
all the award schemes, the DBA Design Effectiveness Awards are the hardest to
win, as we need to prove the effect on our clients’ business that our design
has achieved. You can imagine our delight then, to win a silver award last week
at the DBA awards evening in London.
Fontsmith is a
type design studio, dedicated to designing and developing high quality
typefaces. After 3 years of flat trading, an increasingly congested market and
reducing marketing budgets, the business owner knew he had to do something
significant, to kick-start the
next phase of growth at Fontsmith.
Thompson Brand
Partners unearthed 2 key insights that underpinned their brand-led approach –
the need to get into a designers ‘special things box’ and the need to create a
buzz to raise Fontsmith’s profile.
To achieve
both, a celebration of Fontsmith’s first ’10 years in type’ was developed, with
the idea of telling the font stories as they have never been told before. That
and exceptionally high quality print have been cherished by the target
audience,delivering
some fantastic results.
Against all 5 project
objectives, 10 Years has delivered in big style:
Increase sales
– up 53% year-on-year
Increase sales
of corporate licences – up 255% year-on-year
Raise
awareness – website visits up 50%
Generate new
business leads – 613 new warm UK leads generated
Open up
international markets - 689 new warm international leads
Jason Smith,
owner of Fontsmith, on why the print has worked:
“ In my view,
the quality of the print has reassured designers to choose our fonts for corporate branding
projects, including the library fonts introduced 4/5 years ago that have now come
to maturity. The whole 10 years in type campaign has pushed awareness of
Fontsmith hugely and helped change the type of project our fonts are being
considered for. It’s all about awareness and reassurance.”
