Sysco Guest Supply are a multi billion dollar business who supply amenities such as bubble bath and shampoo to hotel chains like the Marriot and Hilton worldwide. To say that they’re upmarket bubble bath suppliers probably doesn’t do them quite justice! They have an impressive portfolio of both clients and suppliers and are responsible for placing brands such as Hermes, Aromatherapy Associates, Bulgari and Kiehls in top end hotels. In addition to this they also design, manufacture and distribute both their own brand products and create branded toiletries for hotel chains as well.
They approached Flourish to help them create a brochure that would encourage new clients to pick up the phone and arrange a meeting. We’ll be doing the design work over the next few weeks and the first stage was a mood board session to establish both the look and feel and the structure of the brochure. I love working on mood boards with clients. It all seems a little random when we suggest them to clients – how on earth is a bit of cutting and sticking going to make a difference to their design they wonder? And is it really worth the money? Well the feedback from each and every client we’ve done this with so far is categorically yes.
Alice, Sysco’s Marketing Manager, and I started by focusing on what made Sysco Guest Supply unique and the impression we wanted to create. We then brainstormed how the brochure might be structured. Immediately we noticed that our quick response plan lacked customer focus, so we spent some time thinking hard about who Sysco Guest Supply’s clients are and what motivates them to buy. This is often a really valuable exercise for our clients as they suddenly realise that all customers are not created equal, and even in these times, not all are motivated by price.
Understanding who Sysco’s clients were and what motivated them to buy enabled us to prioritise them in order of who Alice wanted to focus her energies on with this brochure. Very quickly and simply we were able to come up with a strong angle for the brochure, and voila, with a bit of jiggery pokery we slotted in a couple of extra spreads into the plan which suddenly made a very company focused brochure suddenly very customer focused.
Even if you don’t have a brochure, do this with your website. You’ll be amazed at the number of websites that are company rather than customer focused.
Anyway, back to the mood board. Within an hour and a half Alice and I had a plan. We’d sketched out roughly the content and order of each page and Alice had a plan that she could use for when she writes the copy up this week. We can also use it to give to the studio when it comes to the design work.
Next up was the cutting and sticking. Armed with a pair of scissors and a stash of catalogues and magazines we cut out images that reflected the stylish, luxurious and professional image we’d like the brochure to have. With our shortlist we then weeded out those that didn’t fit, and with the help of Caroline, the Flourish Studio Manager were able to create the fabulous mood board you see below.
I do realise that this just looks like an effortless collection of images, but trust me when I say that each and every one of those images has been carefully considered and placed on that mood board for a reason. Sometimes it’s about being literal, but more often than not we use these mood boards to think laterally, evoke feelings and spark our creativity. It’s also a fantastic way for the Account Director, Art Director and Client to ensure that we’re all on the same page before we start a job, and the output is so much better for it.
Alice’s comments at the end summed up what was a really fun and very productive morning. She admitted that she’d been sceptical about the value in the mood board but now that she had done it, could absolutely see the benefits. She said it was one of the most fun mornings she’d had in her working life. Praise indeed!
