The Brand Surgery - Branding Agency, Graphic Design and Website Design in Worthing, West Sussex

The Review Doctor. Review. Read. Decide.

Welcome to The Review Doctor

Did you know that as a business, if you get stung by another not-so-nice business, you are not protected by Trading Standards or the Ombudsman relevant to the industry that has stung you. These organisations deem you intelligent enough to read through the terms and conditions. So if you want justice, you need to follow the legal process which can be costly.

Having had our fingers burnt on a few occasions, we decided the world needed a Business Review website so businesses like you can read reviews before signing the dotted line.

The Review Doctor asks customers up to questions for each type of business, for example:

• Hairdressers – How long were you kept waiting?

• Accountants – Was the estimate or quote accurate?

• Insurance – Did the Insurance company pay or wriggle out?

There are seven categories: Health & Beauty, Retail, Trade, Leisure, Business Services, Non-profit organisations, Finance/Legal. All kinds of businesses are listed – from dentists to business coaches to website agencies. We are adding more business types every day.

You can win a bottle of bubbly in our prize draw – all you have to do is review a business. It’s that simple. You can also list your business free of charge until the end of November and ask your customers to write good things about you and you can use these as testimonials on your website and other marketing material. Register today!

Our Mission: To make the world a fairer place by giving all businesses and consumers an honest review of all public, private and third sector organisations. Review. Read. Decide!

You can review any public, private or third sector organisation free of charge! Businesses can list their organisation free of charge until the end of 2011.

We LOVE honest businesses. We LOVE good customer care. We want to read good reviews too. This is a website for the good to shine and for the sharks to starve.

It’s high time a website like this was created. What are you waiting for?!!!

Businesses do not have the same support as consumers do. When you are a business – no matter how small you are – the government and the law say that you should take responsibility. There is  no support for businesses if you are ripped off.

The Review Doctor showcases our digital marketing, logo design, graphic design, website design, website development skills. If you like the design of The Review Doctor and would like a similar website for your organisation, give us a call on 01903 824229 and we will be happy to help you.

Terry Winstanley - WOW FACTOR

Terry Winstanley, Jade Richards and eight other contestants from X Factor 2011 are coming to Worthing (Assembly Hall) for one night only (Friday 4th November 2011, 7-10.30pm) to promote their CHILDREN IN NEED SINGLE and sing their most popular songs from the show.

We met with Terry, from Worthing last week, and talked about the success of Worthing Idol 2011. Terry was so impressed, that he asked us to organise this one-off event. We were naturally delighted to accept. As you may know, we have also organised Worthing Idol 2010 and the fantastically successful Broadwater Royal Wedding Picnic which attracted 3000 people and we raised £1500 towards Broadwater Community Association. We are very excited as this is a national event.

We will be using our combination of design and marketing tools to promote THE WOW FACTOR: logo design, graphic design, social media expertise, website design, PR, and our newly acquired Chartered Institute of Marketing qualification.

Tickets are on sale at www.worthingtheatres.org priced at £12.50 each. If you would like further information, please contact the event organiser – US!! – on 07909 693172.  All profits from the show and the single will go to Help For Heroes.

Check out the new website at: http://www.thewowfactor.org.

Go to the Twitter page: WowFactorEvent and the Facebook page: The Wow Factor

Restaurant marketing and design by The Brand Surgery - click on image to enlarge it.

Food, food, glorious food. We love food so much here at The Brand Surgery.

That may be why we are so busy working for restaurants, take-aways and gastro pubs. We’ve been designing logos for eateries since 2001, and one of our customers likes the logo we designed for him so much that he will not rebrand, even after ten years!

As well as designing logos, we help with restaurant promotion by way of websites, blogging, social media (Twitter, Facebook and Linked In), advertising, e-newsletters, PR, strategic marketing and much more …

Christmas Event Promotions

With the countdown to Christmas now upon us, it is essential to send out your Christmas menus and start advertising your venue to guarantee bookings NOW. There are over 130 restaurants in Worthing alone, so how do you ensure that business office parties book tables in your establishment?

If you don’t have a website, we can get you web presence within a week so you can advertise your Christmas menu and get people to book online. All the websites we have designed for eateries have enabled them to reach page one of Google for their chosen keywords. For example, if you type into Google: “Thai restaurant, Worthing”, Carabao will appear. If you type into Google: “Fish restaurant, Worthing”, The Fish Factory will appear at the top. We can do the same for your restaurant so you get prime position, after all, how many people actually scroll to page 2 or 3 of Google?

We can also send your Christmas menu as a funky, designed e-shot to our mailing list of Worthing businesses within a week or two if you book now. Maybe you want a complete branding overhaul in time for Christmas? No problem.

We can also design Christmas cards, flyers and much more so you can enjoy the season knowing your restaurant is booked. We also work in partnership with The Worthing Journal and some of our new packages include design and a published advert.

Simple. Give Vicky at The Brand Surgery a call on 01903 824229 or email vicky@thebrandsurgery.co.uk. We have four new packages for restaurants, cafes, bistros and other eateries.

So whatever type of Christmas event you need promoting, we have a solution for you. Guaranteed bums on seats!

Vicky Vaughan judges the Open 11

On Friday, Vicky Vaughan was invited to join the selection panel to judge the Open 11 Art Exhibition at Worthing Museum.

Vicky said: “It was an amazing day. I was part of a panel of three judges – my two fellow judges were Nick Toovey from Toovey’s Auctioneers in Washington, West Sussex and Dudley Sawer, Life Drawing Artist extraordinaire, based in Worthing.  There were three categories for us to judge: Sport and Fitness, Celebration and Food for Thought. It was fascinating to see how differently the artists interpreted the subjects.

There were hundreds of entries using all manner of mediums – acrylic, embroidery, water colour, pencil, and pastels. There were a number of 3D projects and sculptures. I can’ wait to see the selected art displayed next week. We also picked out a number of winners who will be revealed in due course – we also created some new prize categories as the standard was so amazing.”

The art exhibition runs from 18th June to 24th September 2011. It is completely free so there is no excuse not to be a culture vulture for the day. If you haven’t been to Worthing Museum yet, you must go. It is amazing – a real gem. It boasts a huge custume collection – so all those dress designers out there – go and see where it all started.

Back to work. On the subject of culture vultures. We are working on the Christmas issues of passenger magazines for Stagecoach South, East Kent and East Sussex. It is interesting designing and researching Christmas events in June. If you have any events coming up, you should add them to our Coastliner 700 website free of charge – there is no catch. Click here.

Digital Marketing Campaign is a Royal Success

Broadwater Community Association is still celebrating after the amazing Royal Wedding Picnic event which attracted over 3000 people and raised £1500 within a few hours.

The success of this event is down to a creative agency called The Brand Surgery who are based in Worthing, West Sussex. The organisers said: “We needed to promote this community event to raise money for a local charity called Broadwater Community Association. The Brand Surgery came up with a fantastic online marketing campaign which included an event website, plus a combination of Facebook, Twitter,
Linked In and blog posting.”

Vicky Vaughan, Managing Director of The Brand Surgery said: “We are thrilled with the success of the Broadwater Royal Wedding Picnic. It was an amazing day. People said they heard about the event via Facebook and Twitter, which just goes to show how powerful social networking is when combined with innovative and creative minds! Whether you want to attract businesses, children, adults or couples to your event, our social media marketing expertise seems to work a treat. Thanks to the brilliant event organisers for their time, passion and enthusiasm.”

We spoke to Vicky Vaughan to find out a few trade secrets to online success.

How does one begin to promote a successful event?
VV: It is best to create a new page on your company website especially for your event. If you don’t have a website, then simply create a new one for your event. Then you need to create Twitter, Facebook and Linked In accounts which should all link to your website. Ideally your social media accounts should be branded to match your organisation’s corporate identity. We created a logo for our event as it is an excellent excuse for marketing, PR and promotional give-aways. Social media is an amazingly cost effective marketing tool.

How did you raise money using social media?
VV: We set up a ‘shop’ in Facebook and people donated through this. They can also donate via our website. Then we energetically tweeted and used our online PR skills.

Why did you decide to get involved with social media?
There is a demand for social media as getting your message out there at a reasonable cost is essential, so armed with our copywriting skills, we launched the first in our range of social media services: blogging. We now have many customers who benefit from this wonderful search engine optimisation (SEO) tool and they all reach top spot in Google for their chosen keyword searches.

Does The Brand Surgery still design logos and websites?
VV: Yes. Our branding and website services are very popular and have won awards for us and our clients. We have in fact just completed a brilliant website for Manhattan Furniture. Look at what they said about us: “The Brand Surgery has just completed our website and we are thrilled with it. They took our brief, and enriched it with innovative ideas using the latest technology and our website is now leaps ahead of our competitors. The Brand Surgery is professional in all communications with us, and the team has made this an enjoyable project. They have looked after us along each step of the way and we would thoroughly recommend The Brand Surgery to any company who wants a competitive edge.” Phil Kethro, Marketing Manager, Manhattan Furniture
Anything else you want to say?
VV: Yes! Just incase you didn’t know, in 2009 we were commissioned to design the entire fleet of Coastliner 700 buses which cruise between Brighton and Portsmouth every 10 minutes. We are still celebrating this achievement. Helen Martin, Marketing Manager at Stagecoach South said:
“We have been working with The Brand Surgery for five years and always find the team enthusiastic and full of new ideas.
Not phased by bigger (literally) projects, The Brand Surgery did a great job of the striking illustrations of south coast iconic images that now brighten up our Coastliner 700 buses.”
Finally, we are soon to become Chartered Marketeers and to celebrate this achievement, we are offering one lucky organisation a free strategic report worth £1000s. Simply email to enter the prize draw. Terms and conditions do apply. Please ask for details. Everything mentioned in this blog is produced in-house. To find out more about how our range of services can give your company a competitive edge, contact
Vicky Vaughan at The Brand Surgery on 01903 824229 or 07909 693172.

Sunny Worthing Food and Drink Guide

Sunny Worthing Food and Drink Guide

We are the proud designers of the first ever Sunny Worthing Food and Drink Guide.

This interesting project utilised many skills from within our branding agency. First we created a concept for the front cover design, and one inside page. We wanted to promote the ‘Sunny Worthing’ them, so we added sun rays around the Worthing Town Centre Initiative logo. We then created a ’sea’ effect using a combination of illustrations and photo effects to create a rustic effect.

Next, to continue with the ’sunny’ theme, we created a ’sun’ with food objects such as strawberries and chillies. Once this concept was signed off, we then set to work importing all the catalogue data from Excel documents supplied by Worthing Town Centre Initiative. We set all the data in the listing style that had been approved by our client. This was a lengthy task as there are over 125 restaurant listings distributed over 40 pages!

The brochure was then printed with a lovely gloss laminated cover. The whole effect is stunning and we are immensely proud of it.

Manhattan Website Goes Live

It has been a big week of websites for The Brand Surgery. We are currently working on two new websites having just switched Manhattan’s website to ‘live’. It feels so good when we flick the switch! There is lots of testing before that happens though!

The Manhattan website is not just a pretty website, it is functional and is a persuasive sales aid for the Manhattan sales team. You can view the full product range and specifications, check out Manhattan credentials, browse the photo gallery and much more …

With this website, we followed the corporate identity which has already been in place for a number of years. Click here and see what you think. If you fancy a stylish and slick website like this for your business, you know where we are. Just a quick reminder: You can call us on 01903 824229 for an informal discussion.

Only four days to go … Until William and Katherine tie the knot. Now we’re thinking – do we or don’t we? Would our customers really appreciate receiving A.N.Other advertising ‘eshot‘ branded ‘Congratulations to Will and Katherine’? There is a fine line between using events as an opportunity for marketing – how many of you sent out Happy Easter direct marketing campaigns?

Royal Wedding Marketing Gone Mad

We’ve been looking at some of the quirkiest Royal Wedding gimmicks on the the market and we were astounded when we Stumbled Upon these:

The Royal Wedding for Dummies! Whatever next? We wonder how many copies have sold!

Royal Wedding Refrigerator We thought they meant a fridge magnet, but oh no! This is a refrigerator with a difference. Will you decorate your kitchen to match?

Crown Jewels Condoms With the relaxed rules about memorabilia branding. Anything goes so long as it is tasteful – apparently.

Royal Wedding Dog Clothing A selection of different messages for you to choose from.

Broadwater Royal Wedding Picnic

We do have a real reason to promote The Royal Wedding because The Brand Surgery have been out in the community again. The boss, Vicky Vaughan, has organised a MASSIVE community event to celebrate this fantastic event which starts at 4pm om Friday 29th April on Broadwater Green, Worthing. There is an amazing line-up – Dave Benson Phillips is bringing along his gunge tank – and guess who is going to get gunged? Tim Loughton MP, Deputy Mayor of Worthing, Ann Barlow and Cllr Alan Rice have all agreed to be gunged if £500 is raised via votes. It only costs £1 a vote and you can by Paypal on our Facebook page (designed by The Brand Surgery) or you can come down on the day and vote. There is lots more fun, including entertainment from our Worthing Idol 2010 (website by The Brand Surgery)contestants and music excerps from the Seussical Musical courtesy of Anyone for Theatre?

Staying with the subject of weddings, the boss purchased some Union Jack bunting yesterday for an impromptu BBQ. Now she can’t decide whether to hang it outside the front of her house – is it patriotic or chavvy? Unfortunately, she had to abandon a project she was working on a few years ago. REBRAND BRITAIN was all about getting the community spirit back into the UK – until someone accused us of being part of the BNP because our logo sported a Union Jack. Logos and brands are all about memories. What does the Union Jack mean to you? You can read more about brand perceptions in Vicky’s book: Do A Madonna.

The Brand Surgery has been extremely busy over the last few weeks with logo designs, press releases, magazines, charity work and blogging and we thought it was about time we let you in on what your favourite award-winning branding agency has been up to!

Anyone celebrating the Royal Wedding this year? Why not come to the Royal Wedding Picnic on Broadwater Green?  We have been organising the event as well as promoting it with our fantastic PR, not to mention coming up with a fantastic logo for the day! The event promises to be a special occasion with entertainment from Splash FM’s Simon Osborne and Dave Hunt, Children’s Entertainer Dave Benson Phillips and live music from last year’s Worthing Idol winner, Rebecca Buxton. The picnic and entertainment will be running from 4pm-9pm allowing you to watch the wedding at home and then enjoy the bank holiday in the sunshine with The Brand Surgery, Splash FM and Worthing Borough Council.

Speaking of Worthing Idol, with this year’s competition, The Brand Surgery is in the community again! We were so happy with the way last year’s competition went, we felt we had to get involved again this year! The date has yet to be announced but Worthing Idol is already looking for contestants so visit Talent Within You website (designed by The Brand Surgery) for more information. Make sure you keep checking our website as well, as we have some exciting news to announce in the coming weeks, watch this space!

Do you use the Stagecoach Coastliner buses? Yes? Well you’ve probably seen our work then! Our illustrations are all over the back of the buses and as part of our ongoing relationship with Stagecoach, we produce their magazines, aimed at providing bus users with offers, competitions and information about attractions along the coast. We have been copy-writing, designing, publishing and printing the Coastliner, Buzz East Sussex and Buzz East Kent magazines, covering a massive area from Margate to Portsmouth including places such as Canterbury, Rye, Hastings, Eastbourne, Brighton, Worthing (of course), Chichester and many more places between. You can find our latest magazines from April-September on all the Coastliner buses and in various tourist information centres and bus stops. We have also been putting our web design and development skills to use by launching the  Coastliner 700 website.

Buzz East Sussex

In addition to all of this fantastic and exciting stuff, The Brand Surgery has been continuing with it’s normal high quality blogging services, keeping AVS Fencing and Proto Restaurant Group at the top of Google search results for their chosen search terms.

Does your company need a re-brand? How about a new logo? Maybe a new website? If you answered yes to any of those questions or are interested in PR work, copy-writing, magazine and advert design, SEO or any of our other fantastic services, please phone Vicky Vaughan on 01903 824229 or email us at info@thebrandsurgery.co.uk; as part of our commitment to great customer service, we aim to respond to all enquiries within one working day.