You know how much we love cake, sweets and treats and an excuse to celebrate. Reaching a new milestone, we’re celebrating being five year’s old.
And so much to look forward to – expansion upstairs, two new members of staff and lots of great creative projects to get stuck into.
This is employee engagement and supplier engagement at its best!
Nicky and Mel were treated to a cruise along the Solent with one of our client’s, Shepherds Bush Housing Group (SBHG). It was part of a supplier away day which was organised to celebrate a successful year for the Group.
It was a day of firsts with SBHG announcing their achievement of Investor In People gold status, and the Synergy girls making their debut on a jet ski!
It’s a fantastic achievement for SBHG. David Blackburn, Director of Business Support, explained how improved employee engagement has had a direct impact on increasing resident satisfaction. Well done SBHG and thanks for a fantastic day!
best practice employee and supplier engagement
This is the life...
Another perfect excuse for cake in the office and this time it’s chocolate. Happy Birthday Gem! 21 again…
We listened to a great presentation tonight at the Bristol and Bath Marketing network by David Wilson from Danone Baby. David talked about the three steps to loyalty being:
1) Having a product that really delights
2) Making sure you’re top of the mind – awareness
3) Building a relationship – done really well through interaction online and offline
Having a fantastic insight and understanding of their customers has helped Danone advise, support and help their customers from pre-pregnancy through to birth – a great example of interacting with customers using a mix of media.
We keep hearing about how Jim Parker, Chief Executive of Southwest Airlines (in the US) is renowned for creating an amazing customer focused company culture. Whilst he was CEO, Southwest was the only major airline to remain profitable after 9/11. And now we’ve read the book, we know why. If you’re interested in internal communications, great leadership and a shared vision, this book has some fantastic advise and stories. Here’s a couple of extracts we really liked.
Great organisations require great leaders at all levels – most employees will never meet the CEO, yet they’re expected to share the CEOs vision and passion for the success of the organisation. Passion and knowledge must pass through all levels of the organisation and be felt and understood at every level. At Southwest, substantial resources were devoted to providing leaders with tools for making good decisions.
The role of the front line leader is a communicator of mission, values, goals and culture. Great leadership is most important at front line levels because this is where a business most directly touches its employees and customers.
Trust and mutual respect are keys to successful leadership. A leader who is not trusted or respected will not be followed. A leader who does not show respect for other people is not likely to be respected.
Engaged employees want to know how their jobs contribute to achieving the company’s mission – people want to be part of a team where they can feel proud, a sense of fulfillment and know they’re making a contribution.
It’s a great read – you can also see Jim talking on the youtube link below.
James Parker, Do the Right Thing
How dedicated employees create loyal customers and large profits
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD2uG06M6Nc
Other good books doing the rounds at Synergy:
More balls than most, Lara Morgan
The Real Deal, James Caan
Inside Steve’s brain, Business lessons from Steve Jobs
It’s great to see the NS Housing rebrand in all its glory. We’ve been working with the team on the name, brand identity, design style and application – from literature right through to the vans on the road as you can see below. It’s great when a plan comes together!
Synergy Creative designed an eye catching vehicle livery as part of the rebrand
Synergy is working with Oasis Academy Brightstowe, a Bristol-based school, to help them communicate their exceptional facilities and innovative approach to learning. In typical Synergy fashion we wanted to understand the school inside out before we worked our creative magic.
So, before term ended, Miss Clark and Miss McGrattan ran two brand workshops with Brightstowe pupils to help us understand what they love about the school and what they’d like to share with others.
We each ran a class of 15 pupils who got stuck into our brand activities, including creating visual brand boards, ‘top 10 charts’ about the school and designing their own billboard advertising.
Their input and ideas was truly inspirational and gave us fantastic insight into life at Brightstowe.
A full day photoshoot at the school and lots of creative thinking will soon transpire into a sales pack and marketing campaign for the school… watch this space!
As you can see the quality of the birthday cake baking at Synergy is rapidly increasing now Zamira has arrived.
Chris is having a fantastic time today on a full day shoot for Ladbrokes. Models have been hired and locations selected with lots of different textured backgrounds – looks like a jolly to us! The Synergy girls are queuing to assist..
We asked Anna to share her experience of working at Synergy this week and this is what she had to say – thank you Anna! And what a great brand you’ve designed this week too.
My name is Anna Thomas and I am on work experience at Synergy Creative who are a Marketing and Design agency in Bristol.
If I am being honest I was a nervous wreck the first morning! This was before I arrived. I am not sure what I was nervous about, but my nerves soon vanished as soon as I walked in and was greeted by a lot of smiling faces and a very pink office! Everyone was so lovely, and when I sat in on the group meeting in the morning everyone introduced themselves (and I think I have done a very good job remembering their names!) Within the first two hours I had probably been offered at least five cups of tea!! That is just a small example of kindness Synergy has shown me this week.
I was given my own desk and the tasks rolled in. I found all of them so interesting for so many different reasons and it showed me all the different aspects of work involved in Synergy, including how to answer the phones correctly (which I am particularly proud of!) The design team also set a brief they had made up for me; it was to design the name, logo and carrier bag for a very British designer. They gave me pointers, but gave me freedom to be creative. I wanted an impressive outcome, so I spent quite a while at work and at home working on the perfect name, I came up with ‘totally UK’. Giles showed me how to use Adobe Illustrator, and then I used the sketches I had made previously on paper, to design the logo on the program.
I have had the opportunity to sit in on several really interesting meetings, which I have learnt a lot from about how to pitch and also how to make something very difficult look easy. All the people at Synergy have been more than happy to help me if I have ever got stuck on anything, and always have work available for me to do when I finished, (which is a good thing!) I have really enjoyed the experience at Synergy and I wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere else. Everyone has made me feel so welcome! The company have gone out of their way to make sure I have had an amazing week and am never unoccupied. I have had the most fantastic time at Synergy, and it has definitely made me think more seriously about a career in marketing and design.
By Anna Thomas
Follow Us
Charity of the year
