Triumph Purchase Options

A simple enough promotion: 3 great offers on the table and the customer picks their preferred option.

We planned to promote the offer on as many different platforms as possible...

• Website banner & news story
• Facebook cover photo
• Email 
• In-store posters
• Bike labels
• MCN (Motorcycle News) advert

...so the look had to be easily recognizable to reinforce the message. I needed something that I could repeat on all these platforms and was adaptable to fit the different shapes and sizes of each. This is where the Union Jack came into play.

The Union Jack:

As Britain's leading motorcycle brand, Triumph often use the Union Jack and other icons of British culture to promote the brand in a patriotic way.

Flags are something you see a lot of in the marketing of companies and their products. Just the other day my brother was telling me that the most popular custom paint scheme on a Harley-Davidson is the Captain America / Stars & Stripes theme. It is one of the best ways to fuel a brand or product identity by tapping into people's preconceived notions about a particular culture. Italian brands probably utilize this more than any other by reinforcing the idea that Italian products are naturally classy and of a high quality. Look no further than the the AGV logo, or Ducati's Panigale Tricolore, for examples of this in motorcycling.

So, Triumph=Britain. However, it sadly isn't as simple as just plonking the first result of a google image search onto a poster to convey this. Otherwise you'll look no better than a slightly questionable ebay seller that feels the need to tell you how fast his UK delivery service is on every product picture.

For the design of my Union Jack, it was important for me not to be restricted by where I could place it on posters/adverts/banners etc. Therefore, I would need to adapt it so it didn't have such rigid outer borders (a.k.a. so it wasn't a rectangle). To achieve this, I looked to create a paint splat / stamp / destroyed / torn version of the flag so that it would merge nicely with any other images. One of the main sources of inspiration for this was the Silverstone logo.

Web Banner:

MCN Advert:

In-Store:

A whole A1 poster for each choice, now that's a little extravagant!

Muc-Off Web Banner and Shop Artwork

Muc-Off certainly have one of the most distinct brand images in the motorcycle trade and it's pretty much down to one thing: pink. I'm sure it comes as no surprise to anyone that pink isn't exactly embraced by the  motorcycling world. Without being too judgmental or sweeping, biking is predominantly a masculine recreation, and human convention dictates that pink is a visual indicator for the exact opposite of this. The only time you'll really see pink used is on ladies branding/clothing and even this is often met with a fair amount  of resistance from female riders as they understandably don't like to be stereotyped in this way.

Most parts departments (including our own) in bike dealerships are a real Aladdin's cave of hundreds of different products. It is only the strongest and boldest brands that are able to stand out from the competition. Muc-Off have proven that this reluctance to use pink has been a real oversight.

As Muc-Off are cleaning and protection products, it makes sense that bubbles have been used as the main design point on artwork for the brand. This, coupled with the pink colours mentioned above is all that really went into making the banner you see here. I then replicated this for use as a footer on other marketing material for Muc-Off in store.

 

KTM Duke 125/200 Powerparts

A few weeks ago, the 2013 KTM Powerparts catalogue was left on my desk with a post-it note with the simple message of "FYI" on it. Despite the relatively vague instruction, I guessed that I had been tasked with populating our webshop with items from the catalogue and producing some marketing material for them. It's what I usually end up doing so it was a fair enough assumption.

The catalogue is divided by bike model and the first one was the Duke 125/200 because it is the lowest spec bike that KTM manufacture. Nonetheless, it still has over 60 genuine accessories attributed to it, so I had a fair bit of work creating stock files before I could even begin with the web banner below.

As you can see, KTM like orange...a lot.

I wanted to relay just how much choice there was for one bike, so fitted in almost every item available onto the banner. It took the best tetris based skills I could muster to make them fit in a relatively uniform way.

When that was all done, I played around with how I could put the text onto such a busy background and settled with a nice translucent strip and then a couple of wonky square outlines ...because KTMs are edgy.

Autoglym Offer

So I was looking through some artwork of mine from last year (pretty much to see if I could reuse old material on similar events this year) and came across this promotion from Autoglym that finished just a few weeks ago. It has definitely been one of my favourite posters on the parts & accessories counter over the past few months and thought it deserved a bit of attention on here.

As far as packaging and branding goes, Autoglym have it spot on in my opinion. They are primarily concerned with cleaning products so their appearance has to suggest that to customers. The simplicity of the grey text on plain white background immediately achieves this, but another thing I was interested in was the font they had started using. As soon as I saw it I got a feeling of reassurance and quality, much like the branding from the likes of Waitrose and John Lewis.

The offer was a free item, of which customers had a choice of two, upon purchase of the main polish. Therefore I thought it would be best to give it the feel of a flow chart and make the process as logical as possible.

I wanted to replicate the simplicity of the Autoglym branding as much as possible and started off with a white background but that didn't work at all well with the two bottles being white. So then flipping the two colours (grey and white) seemed the best way to go. When I had done that it still looked a little too plain so I added in the the circles around the three products and made the arrows a bit more prominent. The finishing touch was to put a bit of a gradient on the background and add some little diagonal lines. Voila.

Learn to Ride

The eagle-eyed among you may notice that this is my first post for about 5 months, which is quite frankly, far too big a gap. I'm sorry, university got in the way.

Its back to business now though and I'm going to kick things off with one of the more punchy promotions we've had in the store recently - the 'Learn to Ride' campaign...

The company I work for, Laguna Motorcycles, recently teamed up with a local bike training school called Dexterity Training. To make the process more enjoyable for enthusiastic amateur riders, we organised a fleet of bikes that would not usually be an option for learning on.

The best aspect of this is that it gives learners the opportunity to try out the type of bike, or even the specific model, that they would be looking to purchase after their test.

The three models chosen were the Ducati Monster 696, the Triumph Street Triple, and the Harley-Davidson 883. They are great entry-level bikes that are steady and comfortable, but with enough oomph to grab your attention.

As far as the design was concerned, I have to hold my hands up and admit that I had no idea it would end up looking like this when I started. I didn't have a gameplan and most of the process was done on a trial and error basis. I'm never one to blow my own trumpet, but I think it actually turned out pretty nice in the end.

However, from the start I did know that including L-plates was not gonna be happening. I'm not sure why, but I find that its a cheap look and thought that the safety cones would be just as effective.

At the moment I don't think there's a colour scheme with as much instant visual impact as dark grey and orange (and in this case, an earthy tone to set a subtle background). It is so important to draw attention to the main parts of the poster with a bold colour and even from a fair distance away, a customer will instantly know what this banner is about. Then if they want to know more, the phone number is also highlighted as a call to action.

The three images shown above were eventually printed on large vinyl pull up banners and have a great impact in the store.

DISASTER!

Unfortunately, before I had the chance to write this up, the banners were taken up to Brands Hatch for the British Superbikes and whilst stored in the gazebo, "someone broke in, tried to grab it and ended up tearing it". I haven't decided if I'm going to believe this story yet, seems a tad far-fetched.

Anyway, I'm hoping a bit of TLC and maybe some sticky tape will patch her up nicely.

Bike Specsheets

I'm sure most of you have come across 'infographics' at some point whilst browsing the old interweb. If not, take a minute to have a look at some of the examples here. I'm a big fan of these because they effectively relay simplified information and statistics in a creative and manageable way. I think that the best ones are those that only use 3 or 4 main colours and replace photographic images for custom vectors and symbols. Anyway, these are what I used as the main source of inspiration for the specsheets below.


Specification sheets for motorcycles are one of the best tools for a customer to compare one bike with another. When there is so much choice out there, finding the right bike for you can be difficult enough without this sort of information being hard to come by. When I've been tasked with creating generic specsheets in the past, I tended to stick to a straightforward list of features to make the information easy to read, keeping pictures and graphics to a minimum. Despite the advantages of this, they were a little boring and not many people would take the time to have a look when we attached them to the corresponding bikes at outdoor events. So, a bit of a spruce up was on the cards.

       

I guess the most notable improvement was the inclusion of the icons. I'll admit that they don't actually provide any additional information but hopefully they act as quite a nice visual prompter.

The example on the right was the first one I made and the difference between this and the updated version on the left is quite noticeable. The Street Triple sheet has a much clearer structure and the additional headers makes it a bit more organised. With the Van Van sheet I'd definitely replace the thicker section dividers if I do these again. There are already 2 types of line dividers (thin line and dotted) on the same page and they also unnecessarily take up a bit of space and make it look a little cluttered.

All together, I think we must have had around 20-25 of these to make so the layout and design really did have to be simple and generic to ensure I had enough time to make all of them for the display bikes at racing and charity events.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point that these were made for last years' season of outdoor events and I'm sure that by the time the next batch roll around, I'll want to re-do the design for these specsheets. It just never ends...