Kick-Off
Workshop

Whilst we appreciate it is not always possible, we encourage early engagement with us to get the best out of the creative process. Our Creative Director is dispatched to your Kick Off meeting to help bring some much needed outside perspective to the opportunity. Often, we find when you are ‘in it’ it can be difficult to see the journey you want to take the prospective client on and what makes you different from everyone else.

Our Creative Director will:

• Challenge your win themes and USP’s
• Help storyboard the bid journey in a creative way to weave as much of the good stuff into the overall campaign
• Ask challenging questions (and the obvious ones that are rarely asked but are always relevant)

Once we’ve captured this information we move to the Scope phase with our internal team.

Scope
Session

In order to truly get the best out of the creative process, it is important to create a great brief. The scoping session (SMSW Internal) involves researching the customer, the landscape, the competition and you.

This includes:

• Research into the customer’s marketing collateral, sales collateral and any advertising
• Research into visions & values
• Research into the customer’s 5 year plan/strategy
• Deep dive into the customer’s brand guidelines to make sure no rules are broken
• Research into the key decision makers within the customer organisation

The scoping session also involves looking into your win themes and differentiators, to create actions and commitments that can be weaved into the messaging throughout the design concepts.

The
Brainstorm

Now we know everything there is to know about you and the prospective client we can brainstorm ideas for visualizing your offer. We treat bids as advertising campaigns and use the same approach as the big agencies do for TV, billboards and magazine advertising.

We look for themes and ideas that will help visualise your offer to the customer immediately and find ways to get additional added value messages throughout the document (Journey).

Concept
Generation

Where most will jump to the Mac we like to stick with the pen and paper for initial round of concept development. This saves time in the long run and helps us to formulate an idea before we commit it to the screen.

We sketch up concepts and ideas and build Word Clouds to extract the win themes for the opportunity. Once we have a firm idea that we know will stick, we present back to our client to whet their appetite and agree what we will take forward into final design.

Once agreed this is where we go to work building a visual to help our clients really see what the final output will look like – packaging, layout, executive brochures and pitch presentation formats that will get their potential client engaged.

Final Design
& Production

We work hard to ensure that the final design isn’t simply a ‘pretty front cover’ but weaves and develops the overall message throughout the document and its content.

We have a tight rein on version control and print production deadlines to ensure that nothing is missed. It is our job to make sure your supplier or our expert print partners deliver on time and to a high standard. Whether delivering to you locally, across the Ocean or direct to the clients front door we have it in our sights.