Recently, I was contacted by an old friend of mine, Michelle Brady, who teaches at the Vale Junior School here in Guernsey. She told me that her class of 8-9 year olds had started a project where they were designing and advertising their own brand of chocolates and that they could do with some advice regarding how advertising works. It has been a while since I was 8 so I wasn’t exactly sure how advanced these kids would be, turns out VERY.
I started the talk off by playing a little game I devised, inspired by a video I watched recently. I printed out a few logos of brands they may have seen before and a few they probably wouldn’t have. To my amazement, they were guessing logos such as Audi and Google Chrome with ease. One boy even knew Lacoste and Chanel! From there, I picked out McDonalds to study further. I asked them how the logo and slogan makes them feel when they see or hear it. They came up with words like “happy”, “excited” and “hungry”. I then went on to explain that all these feelings, the logo and the slogan all add up to create a brand.
The kids were then very eager to ask me some questions about their own marketing efforts. We had some good questions such as “which colour is best to use for our packaging”, I began talking about colour and what each colour connotes (which proved pretty difficult to explain in it’s most basic form). We settled on purple, to suggest luxury and richness. We also had a couple of funny questions such as “Did you design the McDonalds logo?”. Michelle explained that if I had, I probably wouldn’t be here! In the second class the same question was asked, followed by “did you design any of those logos then?”. Apparently my job just isn’t good enough for the Vale Juniors!
All in all it was a wonderful morning and I think the kids enjoyed themselves as well as getting a little help with their project. Crowd would like to thank Michelle and the rest of the Vale Junior School staff for giving us this opportunity and can’t wait to see what the kids produce!