Bringing to life the soul of the Clarks brand

posted by Katherine Drew
5 April 2013

Having worked in FMCG all around Europe, getting involved in the world of fashion with one of the most loved British brands had a particular appeal. The Clarks brand has so many interesting stories to tell to the world that any marketer would get excited to be part of that. We’re talking about a brand that is still family owned and still has its headquarters in the heart of Somerset in sight of Glastonbury Tor. It’s a brand with an ethos to do good; to bring beautifully-crafted shoes inspired by the melting pot of the British culture and a slice of effortless British style to everyone. It’s a brand with an authentic heritage, a brand that’s never stopped evolving, improving and pioneering.

As Group Head of the Brand team, it’s my job is to understand and bring to life the soul of the Clarks brand. What a job! Together with my team we have the rare opportunity to work on building the Brand Foundations: defining the positioning of the brand. We’re busy unearthing the brand truths, refining its personality, and shaping the look and feel of the brand identity- from packaging to advertising. It’s a really exciting job that allows you to shape and polish some of the most important building blocks of a truly authentic global brand. The result will be a clear and consistent Clarks visual brand- one that works brilliantly internally and externally, and sits comfortably across all our markets and categories, across several seasons.

How you communicate with consumers is the very essence of marketing. We’re about to start a very exciting piece of work: to conceive and develop a new brand concept. In other words, the big Clarks idea. It needs to be a big idea because it needs to work across the globe, across all our markets, across all ranges, across all the seasons. It needs to be inspirational and really capture the magic of Clarks. And the concept needs to be strong enough and versatile enough to work for several years. Once we have the concept, we then need develop it and refine it. And, vitally, we need to gain all-important buy-in from across the business. More than that, we have to make sure that we’re working collaboratively and getting everyone in Clarks involved throughout this creative brand journey.

Clarks has always been pioneering and we’re no different here in marketing. We’ve a really talented team and we’ve recently rolled out press campaigns which use augmented reality and Aurasma. So if you want to with work with a forward-thinking heritage brand, a brand that’s not afraid to take risks and be adventurous, then it’s impossible to look past Clarks.

Sebastian Rusu, Group Head of Clarks Brand  

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