Client
Business West
Headquarters
Bristol
Industry
- Not-for-profit
- Business Support
Company Size
- 200+ staff
Services
- Branding
- Graphic Design
The client
Business West is a Certified B Corp with 200 staff and a turnover of £10 million. Their aim is to make the west country area the best place to live and work and their membership of 24,000 businesses trust them to help start and grow as well as lobby government on their behalf. Profits are reinvested back into the business in order to achieve their mission.
The ongoing challenge & solution
Over the past 20+ years, we’ve proud to say we have worked closely with the marketing department at Business West to help them rationalise, grow and develop the Business West brand and how it is used and perceived. We’ve supplied creative input on a wide variety of UK and multinational tactical campaigns including infographics, brochures, directories and prospectuses, all while retaining the Business West or Partner brand’s own styles where appropriate. Business West have a busy marketing department, we’ve worked hard to develop a firm relationship with them, seamlessly taking on projects where needed and lending our experience and expertise to create some lovely marketing materials We’re also delighted to be helping Business West to implement their new rebrand throughout 2023 and beyond.
Innovate UK Tech visits
In partnership with Business West, Innovate UK and UKRI have been organising a series of trade visits to help UK businesses to promote and export their goods and services within Asia. Each visit requires an accompanying booklet that profiles the attending companies as well as providing details of the main contact on the visit. The booklets are always needed on a tight turnaround as attendees are often only finalised a matter of weeks before the visit. They are also multilingual, with English from the front cover until the middle, and then if you flip it around, Chinese or Korean language from the back cover to the middle, certainly challenging but we do love a good challenge and as a bonus we’ve become proficient at working with Chinese and Korean language along the way.
Infographic (pre-rebrand)
With a vast scope of operations and a huge array of services provided, it’s hard for Business West to offer a succinct overview of who they are, what they do and what impact they’ve had on the business community. Their challenge to us (thanks guys) was to come up with an infographic that they could use on their website and in presentations to help illustrate just what Business West is all about. We created an infographic that broke down the business west offering into 3 distinct sections; The Story of Business West; Support for Business; and Voice of Business. These sections endeavour to showcase Aims/Awards/Reach, Services & Impact, providing an at a glance guide to Business West.
Great British Food Programme
We were asked by Business West to help them create promotional material for the Great British Food Programme. An initiative to help UK food and drink businesses promote and sell their wares in China. We created online and printed materials with a strong emphasis on bold infographics that explain how the programme works – connecting buyers and sellers via the massive Chinese smartphone app ‘We Chat’.
Extend your Global reach campaign
Outside of London, the South West of England remains the only net contributor to the UK Treasury. The region’s business landscape is fiercely ambitious and diverse, boasting an innovative, creative, highly paid and skilled economy that is open to the world. We were approached to create something bright and engaging to give out to Chinese partners (distributors, government clients etc.) that would illustrate what the South West is as a region. It was produced in both English and Chinese Language versions as part of the Extend your Global Reach campaign to promote links between China and the South West and firmly establish the South West as a key international player. It utilises a die cut suspension bridge shape through which images of the various treasures of the South West show through, as well as an infographic map showing the pre-existing links between China and the South West.
Making Innovation Happen campaign
Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) helps ambitious businesses innovate and grow internationally. It provides expert advice and support for businesses looking to commercialise ideas and succeed in new markets. There are lots of exciting companies in the South West that fall under this criteria and we were asked to create a brochure that Business West’s Advisers could use to engage with those companies and show the support that they can access through EEN. The brochure itself plays on a visual theme of children dreaming of what they want to be when they grow up, where the children are a visual metaphor for the companies as they grow. It showcases 6 main service offerings and how they can be accessed.
Innovate 2 Succeed programme
Innovate2Succeed is an intensive coaching programme designed to stimulate innovation in business. The programme supports high growth businesses wanting to introduce new technologies or processes to their business or those wishing to launch new products and services to their customers and markets. We were approached to help their innovation specialists in creating a piece of marketing collateral as a leave behind when they go to visit these high growth businesses that would provide an overview of the analysis and strategic support available to them. The brochure uses a theme of childhood dreams as a visual metaphor – the young boy with his wooden and cardboard jetpack symbolising the high growth companies with dreams of making it big. These images are interspersed with infographics which help to explain various processes more easily. The innovation specialists have found the brochure to be a useful tool and it has been in high demand, being reprinted less than a month after its launch. The brochure makes use of 2 interesting infographics, the first explains how the programme works, using a visual representation of cogs fitting together to create the proverbial well oiled machine. The second illustrates the ‘innovation journey with a road winding its way through various stops along the way.
"Bob are a pleasure to work with. Nothing is ever too much trouble and no deadline is too tight. They make the complex easier to understand through good design and they always seem to go that extra mile with enduring good humour."
Marketing Director, Business West