Over the last year we have been working with the ambitious team at DublinBic to reposition, rename, and rebrand the organisation to become Furthr. One of its core brand expressions is the annual conference for start-ups, entrepreneurs, and investors, which features a new brand name and event branding – Furthr Festival. 

Previously, this event was branded as ‘Futurescope’, with little reference to DublinBic. One of our recommendations was that this popular event should be a key expression of DublinBic and that they possess greater ownership and affinity to it. In doing this, the organisation achieves the awareness, takes command of this reputation-building event and obtains recognition for producing such a high-profile event.

In developing the brand for Furthr Festival and other events, our approach can be simplified to 5 key principles:

1: Invest in the master / parent brand 
Be proud of your own brand and the hard work put into making events happen. Take ownership and ensure your reputation, awareness and brand value grows rather than trying to build a new event brand that ultimately is creating its own destiny. It is ok to create standalone event brands if the parent brand wants little association with it, for reasons to do with risk, independence, or investment.

2: Know your audience 
Events have to reach many audiences, from academia to working professionals, specialists to a broad range of industry expertise. Ensure that you can create targeted communication to the audiences you want to reach and that these communications are interesting and motivating to them.

3: Invest key visuals 
Consistency of imagery is central to being remembered and getting cut-through. Develop a key visual as the foundation for the look and feel and a brand expression system can build form the key visuals to flex across many channels and communication touch points.

4: Focus on brand voice 
From headlines to emails, how you motivate audiences to engage and maintain a consistent communication trail without becoming monotonous is key to establishing a clear and identifiable personality for your brand. Your tone of voice is integral to your impact, so make sure you are communicating with your brand character in mind.

5: Make a plan and ensure you have the capabilities for ongoing marketing
Develop a comms plan early on which deals with the many channels, and give thought to building awareness, consideration, purchasing, attending, and advocacy. Ensure you have the resources or a partner to assist in building and creating communications in an ongoing business.

Furthr festival happens this Friday.