OUGD403 - Studio Brief 1 - My Thoughts

For this brief I was very excited to dive in as branding is something im very interested in and want to learn. To begin I went for a walk around Leeds looking at different shops. Companies I considered was Wok & Go, morons, Betfred, pet a manger, Thomas cook, Sainsburys and Pita pit. However for more depth I decided to look for news articles while doing so I came across a few very recent ones on Costa Coffee’s hygiene, this resulted in several shops being shut down. So I decided to look into there branding in my logo Costa. My thoughts where two logos are unnecessary, with one of them being very clustered and slightly tacky, as well as this the interior was very old fashion and was inconsistent throughout. They used a wide variety of different chairs, I find this very unprofessional of such a large company. Things I was worried about with choosing this brand is they are very well established and on a large scale are doing very well however I still do believe the logo and many of the shops could do with a revamp, as I believe there is not much here to appeal to a younger audience of adults such as students, there target audience seems to be very much middle aged adults and up. I think this because while sitting down having a coffee the ratio of adults 24+ was much higher than younger adults, I felt this could be because the space in Costa is not somewhere id particularly like to spent my time when there is coffee shops offering better coffee and a more friendly environment for usually less money than Costa. What I want to achieve from my re-brand is create a more clean, friendly looking brand but with a slight edginess maybe even rustic feel. This is in reaction to the bad press Costa has had about unsanitary hygiene this included, dead rats, rat droppings and deadly bacteria this lead to several stores being closed. Secondly I would like to bring in a large audience of students, as from my primary research I saw that a large majority of consumers looked over 25 to further back this point I am going to create a survey for students in my class.