Award-winning international interior & architectural design firm the G.A Group announced today the launch of its London branding division, G.A Brand Design London (GABD). The company’s stated objective is to extend G.A’s foot-print in the luxury hospitality and private residential sectors by tapping into the firm’s 31 year track record and expertise.
Following the successful pilot of the branding division in G.A’s Kuala Lumpur office in Asia, GABD London is a stand-alone company with its own P&L and dedicated staff. The division will “bridge the gap” on large-scale hospitality and residential projects between master-planning, concept architecture and interior design on the one hand, and brand positioning, experience planning, communications and content on the other.
The new company, G.A Brand Design London, is led by Managing Director Kate Cox and Creative Director Igor Jocic. Both leaders have a strong track record in management positions in WPP Group companies previously. The GABD London team sits in the heart of G.A’s 100-person strong global HQ in Camden, meaning they can seamlessly integrate into the diverse projects that run through the company.
Kate Cox, G.A Brand Design London MD commented:
“Our aim is to offer a fresh approach to brand consultancy that weaves a strong narrative thread through the entire fabric of a business – from its positioning and inception through to its customer experience, content, digital presence and even its bricks and mortar. A clear focus for this service is the hospitality and residential developer sectors, where the complexity and number of consultants are high and the focus on the “why” for the end consumer can be lost in the fog.”
The new proposition has already secured a high-profile client in the shape of American Express for whom GABD London is delivering brand design and strategy for Amex’s highest value Centurion card members via a series of bespoke communications, working in very close partnership with a dedicated and hands-on client team. Cox says that this work reflects the company’s philosophy:
“As a brand solutions company born from a business that understands interior and architectural experiential design, we are unique in that we start with the ideal response of our audience and work backwards,” she comments.
“At G.A Brand Design, we design the emotional reactions to the physical and virtual environments that we place in front of our consumers. Our Amex Centurion work demands a reaction through its artisanal quality, elegant structure and intelligent content. It resonates with an audience typically very hard to understand, let alone reach.”
G.A Brand Design is a natural extension of the G.A Group’s philosophy centred on ‘restless curiosity’; a term intended to reflect its unique and ambitiously creative approach. G.A uses data-inspired narratives to navigate and expand the horizons of brand communications.
“Effective design thinking is about resonance,” explains Global Brand Design Managing Director, Jonathan Aeberhard. “And resonance, in the sense of creating something that truly strikes a relevant emotional chord in the audience, can only be the natural conclusion of a process if it starts with listening and learning about our audience. Our aim is to deliver design solutions that fuse people, place, culture and context effortlessly within bold, extraordinary and often instant customer experiences. G.A has done this for decades via interior design for projects like W Taipei, W Shanghai, The Palace Tokyo and Corinthia London. Now with our branding practice we are able to extend that expertise into traditional and digital media or content. The aim is still always that sense of unexpected relevance and harmony. Just as an environment can generate that tacit feeling of belonging, so too can brand communications.”
He adds that a major part of the value that clients see in the service is having a brand partner that can integrate their brand from inception of the project, working harmoniously with all consultants and sub-consultants across the digital-physical divide to help drive a consistent expression of the brand across all consumer touch-points.
Although G.A Brand Design London caters for the UK market, it intends to offer global solutions, supported by the group’s other offices & skills in Kuala Lumpur, Budapest and Shanghai.
For more information visit: https://thega-group.com/