Background

As long-term guardians of the LEO brand, Fuzion are accomplished at designing sub-brand visual identities, support assets and promotional materials on tight deadlines whilst growing the visibility and range of the client brand.

Fuzion have been instrumental in the Enterprise Ireland-led development of the LEO brand and have designed many hundreds of support materials for events like National Women’s Enterprise Day [NWED], Student Enterprise Awards [SEA], Local Enterprise Week, Look for Local, Green for Micro, Ireland’s Best Young Entrepreneur [IBYE] and many more. The majority of online promotional materials under the client hashtag of #MakingItHappen were designed and produced by the design department at Fuzion.

In response to the Covid shutdown. March 2020 saw the beginning of an unprecedented range of asset production for Fuzion and the LEOs and associated third-party vendors who relied on assets and brand guidance from Fuzion, via the Enterprise Ireland Communications team.

The initial brief requested the creation of a new sub-brand under which the Local Enterprise Offices could release Covid Response materials throughout the course of the crisis. It was important that this sub brand could be free-standing, be versatile and be scalable – as at that point the scope of the materials to be produced and the associated needs of the LEOs was not yet measurable.

OUR ROLE

Launched with the tagline “Helping your business respond to COVID-19” the messaging was released across the organisations’ portal and general social media platforms and also the social media accounts of the 30 Local Enterprise Offices. Promotional materials included Instream web cards, carousels, headers and two short video stings to quickly identify the LEOs as being a primary source of support to small business in Ireland.

A series of client-focused case studies ‘Client Focus’ were designed and typeset by Fuzion, released over the course of 2020 as peer-led examples of how businesses could pivot successfully under new circumstances with the aid of the government supports being released nationwide and locally by the Local Enterprise Offices. 18 businesses were profiled in total and these case studies were released periodically, with accompanying promotional materials to draw clients to where these case studies are gathered on the LocalEnterprise.ie portal.

Here they reside with ‘Expert View’ a secondary series of articles written by LEO and Government representatives, each detailing an associated government support to small business. All of these were branded with the LEO Response sub brand and on their initial launch all were accompanied by full suites of web and social media promotional materials.

As the Local Enterprise Offices are distributed across 30 locations, nationally, there were several third party vendors also active in the production of materials.Part of Fuzion’s remit was to supply suites of assets including logos and templates for the seamless production of on-brand materials throughout the duration of the project. We were also called upon to assess third party materials and provide advice and support on branded assets produced by them.

As we progressed towards the summer of 2020 we also were asked to adopt the universal yellow and black official Government branding for COVID-19-related communications into communications for the LEOs. As such, the Response sub-brand changed towards that now-distinctive colour scheme. While doing this, we also retained the suites of icons and the styles of information layout that we had developed in the months since the project began. This facilitated the client having the freedom to choose which visual identity they wished to release certain communications under as the year progressed.

Over the course of the relationship, our responsibilities grew, as did the full range of materials on the client’s behalf. Far from producing just case studies and promotional materials, Fuzion were responsible for the design of various support application forms and their iterations and details changed with each new Government announcement. We were required to move nimbly and quickly in the short amounts of time between Government announcements and the proposed time for the roll-out of each set of supports to ensure that the correct application forms were available at all times. Our client’s communications campaign successfully led to many many small businesses in Ireland receiving much-needed Government supports.