Big Rudder

The strength of our offering comes from our 3-Level approach. It’s a simple way of defining the key areas which need to be considered – and balanced – when formulating or refreshing a brand.

Combining the above 3 disciplines means that our clients get the best of all worlds, and the sort of recommendations that tick all the right boxes commercially. We don’t pretend to be cheap, but we do offer genuine value for money. An investment with Big Rudder will leave you with so much more than an attractive logo. We will add clarity, provide direction, and boost your bottom line.

We’ll dig deep about the marketplace you operate in, the challenges you face, the opportunities open to you, and what the competition is up to.

Then we’ll go away and formulate a strategy that plays to your strengths.

Most clients find this process to be something of an eye-opener – our aim is to get you thinking about your business, your brand and your marketing in a completely different way.

Depending on your requirements, this could be an overarching marketing strategy or a more straightforward brand strategy - but the objective is to give you something meaningful that will underpin, reinforce and invigorate everything you do going forward. We will create a long-term marketing framework you can follow and stick to.

When you, and we, are completely satisfied with a marketing strategy (and from that, a design brief) which is going to navigate your business in the right direction, we start with the creatives.

Every recommendation will have been carefully considered by all of us before we present to you. No shortcuts.

The aim is that you’ll be spoilt for choice! Once you’ve narrowed down the options, we’ll tweak and polish your preferred route until everyone is completely happy.

Where we go from this point is completely up to you. At the very least, we’d provide you with the strategy document, along with a master artwork logo set and brand guidelines that you can use going forward.

Ideally, we’d like to take things to the next stage with you - and explore how your new brand can be successfully applied in a variety of contexts and different media. We will be happy to use our creative expertise to guide the way, and help your existing marketing partners/suppliers understand and get their teeth into your new, well-rounded strategy and collateral.

But whereas BTL Creative is a full service agency, we always had the dream of creating a pure brand consultancy – with none of the ‘noise’ that surrounds a graphic design house. And – let’s be frank – over the years we’ve constantly become irritated when we came across other brand consultants who charged (in our opinion) inflated fees for impractical, ill-thought-through creatives.

It became clear to us that there was a serious gap in the market that we could fill – that we could provide an intelligent brand consultancy service, operating in a self-sufficient fashion.

And so Big Rudder was born.

Big Rudder is not a ‘feeder’ for BTL Creative, or some clever lead generation device – it operates independently, as a completely separate entity. Our Big Rudder clients might choose to use BTL Creative to roll out campaigns once we’ve established the direction, but there is no expectation or pressure to do so…we understand that you may have existing suppliers in place for this, and we don’t want to step on any toes.

We know from first-hand experience that many marketing teams are great at addressing short-term demands, but they simply don’t have the space to be deep thinkers. They go from project to project, budget to budget. More often, when it comes to the top line marketing issues they primarily treat the symptoms, but not the cause.

We want to help break that loop, to help your marketing change from being reactive to become much more pro-active.

We want to help adjust your mindset and begin to out-think rather than out-spend your rivals - because that is how you will gain a commercial advantage over them.

We are always thinking about the commercial ramifications – work smarter, get more business, and be more profitable.

And if you don’t have a big marketing department, you could parachute us in to perform a tactical role – a strategic ‘bolt-on’ to give your marketing team valuable direction and support without treading on too many toes.

You might also recommend us to clients, as an independent ‘think-tank’ to help them formulate coherent marketing strategies and outline plans in advance, and to write sharp and relevant briefs you can really get your teeth into. In doing so we would be giving you the best possible chance of delivering outstanding work; work that will help secure relationships and win more business too.

We (because we’ve been in the business for so long ourselves) know that not every agency/studio can afford to have a heavyweight strategic/creative team on their books all the time – so we can be a tap that you switch on and switch off, as and when you need us. When you have too much on your plate, we can be there to support you.

You’d be buying our experience and borrowing our brains.

We can deliver new perspectives, fresh ideas and enhance your client offering – and win you more business. We’re open to how you’d want to work – because ultimately we want to help you make your business more effective and profitable.