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A new look for Rolls-Royce

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A new look for Rolls-Royce

The Innovation team at Instinctif harness the best of the future to deliver market-leading ideas in the present. The team’s specialism spans digital strategy and marketing, data & analytics, and strategic brand. With the world and news agenda fast-changing around us, now’s the time to get agile in how we think and work.

This newsletter brings you the best of the week in the ‘new normal’, straight from the desk of the Innovation team.


This week we hear our Creative Director, Matthew McGuinness’ take on Rolls-Royce’s brand refresh.

Movie trailers were once a brief thrill limited to the cinema experience.

In today’s media landscape, they are ubiquitous, much like cat videos and ‘fail’ clips on YouTube. The industry cites them as such a big deal that they require a prominent degree of outsourcing (usually several are produced by several different studios), undergoing a series of processes that takes almost as long as the production of the film itself. The attention movie trailers garner helps predict the success of the film and thus gauge the return on investment.

Brands, specifically the visual aspect, take a similar amount of time to build (or rebuild) as a movie does, and so, taking a page from Hollywood’s playbook, they too are packaging the salient parts of their reconstructions in a compelling and inspired narrative.

Enter Rolls-Royce

In recent years the average age of its customer base has reduced by 8-10 years from 52 to 42 years old. It has seen the numbers of participants using its app grow, and the company is, understandably, encouraged to engage more directly with this demographic.

One of the objectives of the rebrand was to shift it from being seen as stuffy and ostentatious to something more contemporary, while remaining true to its heritage and affluent customer base. Not an easy task for a brand such as Rolls-Royce to undertake.

Rolls-Royce has now assumed a more modern approach to its typography and colour palette, a new icon inspired by its famous figurine, the Spirit of Ecstasy.

The new brand seeks to maintain its heritage and its presence in the future, thanks to the Pentagram’s partner Marina Willer. Willer importantly notes, and this sentiment could be a key component of the brand’s successful new image, “I’m not a car person and I don’t come from an automotive background. I’m also a female designer. So I come with a different take. It helps the brand move away from stereotypes and become something different.

The press images circulating on the internet exhibit the new brand application on handbags, screens, gift boxes and bags – crucially, everything but the car’s themselves. Remember they are now a luxury house. The rebrand is as stunningly beautiful as it is modern and innovative.

Luxuriate in the new brand here.

I could write for hours about all that I see, but what really caught my eye and piqued my interest was the short video clips, which could best be defined as the brand’s trailers. These short clips, maybe only a few seconds long, reveal a tremendous amount of thought and attention to detail.

In its brevity, the sheer complexity and the multitude of decisions being made behind the scenes in the studio and in-office board rooms become crystal clear. The video is the perfect amount of technical nuance; action-packed, awe-inspiring imagery, the ‘stay-tuned’ type of coming attraction a brand could ask for.

With my large popcorn in hand, I am sitting back eagerly waiting for the next vehicle visuals to drive by. The brand is set to begin its public-facing roll-out at the end of this month.

Top tool of the week

Those familiar with Instagram will know that you cannot share a link to content directly from a post. The bane of many a social media manager’s working life. Generally people get around this by sharing a link in their account bio.

There might be a (paid) solution around this, with a patent application revealing the social media giant now may be charging a fee to add links to photo captions.

The idea would be that if an online system detects that text content of the caption includes a URL, it will prompt the user to pay a fee in exchange for generating a link.

Hold fire on plunging a hand into your wallet in readiness for all the links you’ll now be scattering across your profile. We’re just at patent phase now – but we’ll let you know if this update becomes the stuff of reality.

Top tip

This week’s tip comes from the Innovation team as a collective.

It is no secret that this year has been a tough one, and it has had an impact on our collective mental health. Last week, as part of World Suicide Prevention Day, Facebook announced a range of new mental health support tools that will be coming out in the next few months. This includes a number of additional steps to keep safe online, including providing people with localised resources and access to over 100 local crisis helplines through its COVID-19 Information Center.

Facebook is also looking into providing a new, real-time assistance option via Messenger chat.

A Facebook spokesperson commented that, “Getting people help in real time is especially important when they are in distress. In the coming months, we’ll make it easier for people to talk in real time with trained crisis and mental health support volunteers over Messenger.”

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