1. The Task: Design a character to act as a mascot for Riverside Greetings to feature prominently in their brand marketing communications. Your character may be an animal, a human, figure or an object.
2. Prize: £200
3. Background: Riverside Greetings are an innovative business-to-business greetings card manufacturer, specialising in supplying the convenience sector. Riverside’s mission is to help convenience retailers sell more greeting cards and delight their shoppers. As a challenger brand within the sector, they are disrupting the conventional norms of greetings cards and providing their customers with best-selling category displays and a strong emphasis on delivering stellar customer service.
In 2021, Riverside rebranded into their current format. The rebrand came alongside a new service strategy through a programme of instore research with the business now seeing a significant growth in customer numbers. Riverside are in a position of strength as they are winning business from their competitors through providing a better service, proposition and delivering greater profits for their customers than their competitors.
Riverside are now looking to execute a marketing strategy to improve the quality of customer they are able to attract and to transform their reputation to being the category leader for service and thought leadership. With new data analytics capabilities coming into the company, Riverside will be in a position to strengthen their proposition and be able to delight their customers more and provide a greater service for their customers and improve their financial performance even more than the currently do.
The main segment Riverside are wanting to target are the larger convenience symbol groups such as regional Co-ops, Spar’s etc. The objective is to communicate to/for the attention of the “gatekeepers” for these organisations. These organisations have “advocates” and internal stakeholders who are the main decision makers for category management.
4. The Riverside Brand Personality: The personality we operate with and want to communicate outwardly are:
Innovative
Ambitious
Successful/Experts
Trustworthy
Quirky
5. The Riverside Mission, Vision and Values:
Mission: “To help convenience retailers grow the category, sell more greetings cards and delight their shoppers”
Vision: “To add the most value and deliver the best service of any greetings card supplier to the retailers in the convenience sector.”
Our Values: “We are passionate about:
- Growing our customers businesses
- Championing the category in convenience
- Creating products shoppers love
- Support each other to be the best”
5. Detailed Brief: Riverside are seeking a fictional spokes-character in the form of either an human character, non-human character, or object which can be used to convey the brand personality, culture, values and service benefits of Riverside to consumers.
Alongside a detailed image, write a description of your character in 250 words or less. You may include sketches. Demonstrate clearly the synergy between your character and Riverside's brand personality. Why is your character ideal to communicate Riverside's brand and how does it epitomise their mission, vision and values?
6. Judging Criteria: All submissions will be judged blind. Riverside will pick the character that they feel most closely fits the Riverside brand personality and has the greatest potential to effectively Riverside's brand marketing communications. Andrew Glen, managing director, will have the final say on the winner.
7. Deadline for Submissions: 27th October 2023
8. Submit Entires to: riversidecardscompetitions@riversidecards.com
