How effective is the

combination of your

main product and

ancillary texts?Alex Mateus

What is brand identity? Brand identity is the face that the consumers see of a company or of a

product. Brand identity helps consumers to be able to identify a certain company within a market and therefore become recognisable. Brand identity is built by the company though the use of the company or product name, images, their logo, a tagline and often their style.

For us, creating brand identity was an essential part f our marketing campaign as we are a small group in a very large market. By creating our main products to be similar yet unique to one another, we were able to create our own identity.

Warm Bodies Brand Identity

Before creating our own brand we had to understand what it meant

to create a brand that represented a product.

I researched the media campaign of the film ‘Warm Bodies’ to try

and identify what gave that film its identity. Although this film isn’t of

the same genre as ours it was still a useful example to look at as a

starting point and as inspiration.

So what did make ‘Warm Bodies’ brand identity a success?

Warm Bodies Brand Identity

To start with I looked for its main selling point, which I established was that the film is a hybrid genre being both a thriller and a romance film. Another main selling point was the inclusions of zombies which adds it to the fictional genre.

To get the unique selling point of the film across, marketers worked very hard on their marketing campaign and predominantly used multiple film posters to create brand identity. As you can see from the pictures on this slide, brand identify was created through the continuous use of colours, taglines and similar imagery in all of the posters.

Identity analysis As you can see from the images of the film posters, only three main colours

were used in all of the posters. These colours, being red, white and dark grey helped to establish an identify within the market and created a recognisable style for the film. Although each colour is different from one another, they are placed together to highlight different aspects of the film. As the text is mostly all in white, this highlights the importance and significance of the slogan and offers the audience an insight into what might happen in the film.

The slogans on each poster are different, which makes the marketing campaign unique and entices the audience to further research the film and look at the other slogans to again, get an insight into what happens in the film. The slogans also combine the different themes of the film together as ‘dead’ represents the zombie yet ‘until he met her’ hints at romance.

Romance is also represented in the marketing campaign through the continuous use of the main image being of the two characters played by Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer.

Our Media Products and Creating Our Own Brand

Identity Based on what I found from researching the marketing campaign of ‘Warm Bodies’ I was able to

form some ideas of how to create an identity for our own film.

As you can see from these images, our media products created a strong brand identify for our film. Inspired by ‘Warm Bodies’ and other films similar to the genre of our film, we decided to focus on our main character as the face of the marketing campaign. As the USP for our film was the split personality of our main character, it felt only right to focus on him and use him as our base. We used the story behind our film as inspiration for our brand identity and therefore incorporated different little elements into our media products to help show our characters personality as well as his development.

Much like the ‘Warm Bodies’ film posters, ours focused on the character is in the film. It was also important that we got the balance of colours right so that the film title and tagline stood out, but without taking any attention away from the main image. As in most of the ‘Warm Bodies’ film posters, the way the two characters are standing represents the theme of the film so we thought that we should reflect this in our film poster which is why we chose the image we did and edited it so that it almost looks like two different people.

By using this image for our film poster, we were able to create a face for our branding. It also helped the audience to begin to understand the main character as well as understand our tagline ‘we all have darkness inside us’. By using the dark colours and shadowing out half of his face, we were able to represent the darkness of our character to our audience.

We also chose to use other colours including red and grey creating a wheel of colours that were quite low toned yet contrasting as the red was highlighted amongst the grey and the black. We used red as the colour presents danger and fear. As in our film our character creates a lot of fear and is also quite murderous, red seemed like an appropriate colour to use. We then decided to add a red hue to our characters eye, which symbolized to the audience that eh was the devil. The use of a black background represents the fear of never ending and unknowing and in addition to the use of grey adds a sense of secrecy and suspicion.

I think that our poster was one of the strongest parts of our marketing campaign. It strongly represented what we were trying to convey to our audience and really tied in with our other media products.

Our Media Products and Creating Our Own Brand

Identity

‘WARM BODIES’ FILM POSTER

OUR FILM POSTER

Our Media Products and Creating Our Own Brand

Identity For our film magazine we wanted to make it look as close to a real

magazine copy as possible. To do this we looked at films of the same genre to see what types of magazines that they featured in. we chose to use Empire magazine for our film as it is a film with a similar genre to those that they review and feature in their issues.

By using Empire as our magazine, we had already begun to create branding. The masthead of the magazine fitted nicely with our colour wheel as it was a bold red. This time we used a different image to the poster as it is a different media product with a slightly different purpose and target audience. The use of a close up of our character for the main image created a consistent face throughout our media products for the audience to be able to recognise. By using the same shadowing affect a we did for our film poster, the audience were able to create the same impression on our character as they could form the poster as having two different personalities. We also used similar features in our magazine poster that we used in our magazine such as the black background as the same us of colours with the addition of yellow to attract more attention to particular parts of the magazine.

By introducing the yellow to our colour wheel we are slightly going again our colour scheme and our brand identify, however I think the inclusion of this colour had a positive impact on the film poster and made it more successful. This was also done in the ‘Warm Bodies’ film magazine as they used slightly different colours to their posters and had a different style. It also uses a more close up image of the characters just like ours does to rally allow the audience to get to know the character which is also done within the magazine through reviews and interviews.

Our Media Products and Creating Our Own Brand

Identity Like any film, our teaser trailer was the main media product and source of

marketing for our film. It allows us to give the audience an insight into what the film is about as well as the characters lives and leaves them wanting to watch the whole film. It is also an important media product to use to incorporate each element from the different media products and bring them together to strengthen the brand identity. We focused on the same things that we did in the magazine and poster for the teaser, including the shadowing of the character and the colours that we mainly used.

Click image for link

Our Media Products and Creating Our Own Brand

Identity Through the use of shadowing and using short clips of the characters face, we gave

the audience the impression that the character was very secretive and kept to himself. This creates a sense of unknowing and mystery as the audience don’t know what, at this point, is making him so mysterious and isolated. We chose to use short clips to keep the characters identity as the focal point without letting the audience know to much about him. By using him as the only character in our teaser trailer, the audience are able to identify him as the main character within the film which is also done with Nicholas Hoult’s character in ‘Warm Bodies’. The use of shadows was also a key elements to disguise our characters identity as well as to create brand identity through our media products. In our teaser trailer we used a shadowing effect on shots that we key to understanding the change in his character. This will help the audience to begin to understand his change in personality and behaviour. In ‘Warm Bodies’ shadowing is also used on Nicholas’ character before he meets Teresa’s character and feels an attraction. By doing the same, our teaser trailer became a success.

By using the same colour wheel in the teaser trailer as we did in the other media products, we were able to create brand identity throughout our trailer. We did this through adding hues to different shots as well as adding blurring effects. Our use of colour wheel is also seen at the beginning of our teaser trailer in our company ident shown below, which I personally believe ties together nicely with our other media products and creates strong branding.

In Conclusion….. In conclusion, I believe that we created three successful and strong

media products to create our own unique brand identity for our film. I think that by focusing on the genre that we were focusing on being thriller/horror and then considering the kind of audience that watch those types of films, we were strongly influenced but in a good way. By using the colour wheel that we did and choosing images that were appropriate for our media products, we were able to represent our character having a split personality and allow the audience to be able to make a guess about the narrative of our film.