Cherryflava

Cherryflava 2010 report card: Our year in review

Posted on 22. Dec, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry in Streetflava

The end of this year feels like the 5km mark of a half marathon – there is still a long journey ahead, but by now the muscles are nice and warm and the system is awake and rid of the all the starting sluggishness.

The new Woodstock Cherryflava HQ

As a company we have grown considerably in 2010. We moved premises from our small office in Claremont to a much bigger production studio in Woodstock. The Cherryflava HQ now includes a prototype production laboratory, which is rapidly growing in business. We also took on two new team members, Isabeau Joubert on the creative side and Stefan Boshoff as our in-house industrial designer.

It's all bells and whistles in the prototype lab

This year once again has been about fine tuning our area of speciality, which is brand experiences. It’s an emerging field of marketing specialisation, but a powerful tool for brands to use to manipulate the consumer’s perception of reality and radically enhance those all important brand touchpoints.

Our philosophy is that brands need to present themselves as authentic and respectful and approach their marketing strategy from a holistic perspective in which the lasting brand experience needs to be a remarkable one so that the rest of the good work that the other layers of communication do, doesn’t go to waste.

We were lucky enough to have done some really innovative work with Steenberg Winery, Woolworths, Dimension Data, British American Tobacco and G2 this year.

Saving Grace – the internal alternate reality game that we produced for Dimension Data, was a huge success and we certainly revelled in playing the puppetmaster for 400 extremely enthusiastic IT professionals as they made their way through a two-week journey inside the dark recesses of the Internet.

Recognition wise 2010 was an exceptional year. We were honoured to be awarded the Ogilvy Best Media and Marketing blog trophy at the 2010 South African Blog Awards and the Men’s Health Game Changer of the year.

As far as industry commentary is concerned, the platforms of the weekly Cape Talk Ad Feature, the Cherryflava segment on MFM92.6 and the monthly Cherrypicking segment on the ETV show Maggs on Media as well as this daily website, continued with verve this year.

But 2010 wouldn’t have been possible without the collaboration of a number of highly talented people. There are so many people that make what we do possible, but we’d like to particularly single out some of them for their awesome contribution:

Lauren Beukes and Sam Wilson as well as Graham from Pixel Warrior for their inspirational work in making Saving Grace the enormous success that it was.

Rayno from Rind Routing, Alistair from Active light and Dionne at Reflex Plastics for all of their immense help on the prototyping production side of things.

And a huge thanks to all of our clients this year, in particular Nina and Dan from G2, Anetha from Steenberg Winery and Nicky, Vicky and Natasha from Dimension Data for having the guts to experiment and innovate with your brands.

For the first time ever, we will give ourselves a deserved rating of an A for 2010. Next year is already set to be a very busy one for us as the demand from corporate South Africa for maximum return on marketing budgets gets stronger.

The blog will take a bit of a break over the festive season, but we’ll be back to a daily schedule of posting by the 12th of January.

Peace.

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