6 MEA MARKETS / African Excellence Awards 2021 , May21262 The work that Bulls and Lions Creatives undertakes allows leaders an incredible opportunity, namely to explore brand models before investing money in industrial production. By having the space to explore, it’s possible to come to better decisions with higher success rates. This is not just anecdotally a better system, but one which has been approved by recent scientific studies from Mckinsey Insights in June 2021. It confirms that companies which integrate creativity, analytics, and purpose are delivering at least two times the growth of their peers. The innovative ideas that drive Bulls and Lions Creatives forward are based on the market in which they find themselves. This is a firm that operates in an emerging market, with corporate and business leaders who need to scale businesses rapidly, with less risk, and higher impact expectations. Having a quick, sharp and effective impact is crucial to the team’s continued success. Brand innovation for the Bulls and Lions Creatives team revolves around the reinvention of three key levers, namely data integration, social proof by experimentation and digital solutions to scale brands outreach. The team has found its position in the industry by being pioneers in this regard. No other company develops digital solutions for creative brand building and brand management in the same way, and this has opened up numerous opportunities for a new kind of brand leadership within the industry. With this in mind, the team have spent a great deal of time and money investigating new solutions that could have an enormous impact on the industry. The BrandShaper® is the incredible result, designed as a breakthrough digital solution that helps Marketers to co- build strong brands with other stakeholders such as internal teams, corporate stakeholders, clients, suppliers and start- ups. Being able to involve more people from an early point allows them to achieve some impressive return on little investment. The BrandShaper® is based on serious gaming concepts and uses a creative design thinking approach to alter the way in which brands are seen online. Put simply, this impressive product offers a new way to interact with audience as well as collecting live data during events such as e-workshops. The world in the last year and a half has changed enormously, and there has been a need for businesses to match up to that rapid change. For many brands, there was a sudden gap that needed filling in terms of digital communication. Where previously, working digitally had been a facet of their workload, it quickly became the core method of sending out messages to a key audience. What brand leaders needed was tools that could allow them to govern their brand image and communicate it with as much agility as possible. As these companies were working on ensuring that their vision, brand elements and projects could be understood effectively in this new medium, it proved incredibly difficult to spread the new brand culture quickly and keep the employees connected to the brand purpose and vision. This is why, Bulls and Lions Creatives has developed a new solution for a better Brand Governance: TheBrandPedia®. This is a digital platform that centralizes all the brand ingredients and allows both the communication and marketing teams of a company to manage the deployment of brands in different markets in an efficient, seamless and agile way. The nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen African markets amongst some of the most affected. It has revealed the region’s various vulnerabilities and highly challenged the population’s social and economic resilience. Certainly, one of the greatest challenges for a company like Bulls and Lions Creatives was to encourage customers and businesses alike to embrace new behaviors, including digital ways of living, working and producing. It was a context that demanded quick change from brands across every industry, moving populations to remote work, cancelling customer events and navigating economic crises with drastic cuts in communication budgets. What has become clear as the dust has settled is that the pandemic has merely accelerated the processes that have already been underway, namely the focus of businesses on digital brand activations, e-commerce shift and strategic agility mindset. It has also allowed Moroccan industry to demonstrate its incredible capacity for innovation and agility. The country has proven more than capable of producing many high-quality products in short order, although not quite to the degree where Made in Morocco has developed worldwide notoriety. One of the key drivers for the team at Bulls and Lions Creatives has been transforming the strong signal sent out by the region’s industrial and innovation ecosystems and exploring ways of unlocking the true potential of local businesses at large. Of course, the development of the sector, and of branding for the organizations within it, is only possible with the hiring of the best possible talent, and also empowering them with the best possible equipment. At Bulls and Lions Creatives, decisions are made around the idea that a great flexible environment at work contributes to set a high creative mindset. During the last eighteen months, the need for a team that can gel in a crisis has been clear and proven by the way in which the firm has stood strong. While technical knowledge can be acquired on the job, talent which has a bold, positive and eager to learn attitude cannot be taught. It comes with a person. For those who pass this test, the Bulls and Lions Creatives team have ensured that their lab is fully equipped with all the materials that might be needed to thrive, including the latest technologies such as 3D printing, laser-cutting, 3D scanning, interactive touchscreens and soils. This incredible catalogue of different methodologies ensures that the team can prototype any physical or virtual experience on behalf of their clients, knowing that it will work before money is invested. The future for the Bulls and Lions Creatives is incredibly bright, pushing new frontiers for the region and the team as a whole. Moving forward, it seems certain that the African Brand Lab will be an inspiration to industries and companies across the continent. As time moves on, the team intends to continue the growth of its digital activities, which will allow it to support the Moroccan start up ecosystem even further. Success here will open the doors to a whole new range of clientele from an international background. Branding is an invaluable addition to the business landscape, but it takes true leaders to make the most of its incredible potential. We celebrate the incredible work of the team from Bulls and Lions Creatives, and look forward to seeing how their world beating approach will have an amazingly positive impact, not just on the businesses that work and thrive in Morocco, but on the international stage. Company: Bulls and Lions Creatives Name: Hayat Akefli – Founder & Head of Innovation Strategy Email:
[email protected] Website: www.bullsandlions.com