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About Us
Creative Thing is an award winning advertising, graphics and web design firm.
Historically we have a broad background in design. Over twenty years, we have designed award winning print design and advertising. We have managed BP’s intranet globally. We have created web systems and sites for companies such as Egg and the Bank of Scotland. And we have designed life saving mountaineering gear for companies such as Karrimor and Rohan. 
The reason we started Creative Thing is because there was a huge gap in the market for properly designed communication tools, constructed properly with research, and a proper design process. The reason this gap exists is because so many people think that graphic design is an artistic exercise. Something to do with making things look ‘cool’.
This is wrong.
A little vox-pop exercise:
How many websites have you visited? How many can you remember and visualise right now?
Do you get onto a website, get what you want from it and then get out? Or do you hang around a while and explore it’s content?
Do you like useful websites or nice websites (or perhaps something of both)? Is what you think as nice, also what everyone else thinks as nice?
Do you return to websites? If so is it to get more of the same information or more of the same user experience?
Your answers will probably suggest that you visit a quite a few websites over the course of a week or month, but you do not revisit many websites and you cannot really remember what too many of them were like within about ten minutes. You generally are looking for information or to help you form an opinion about a thing or about an organisation. If you do return to a website, it is because you need to regularly top up on the latest information. You think a website is a reflection of the company behind it. You tend to hate too many whistles and bells getting in the way of finding what you are looking for. Most of your friends and colleagues would agree with you about this.
Online marketing is one of those phrases which seems to crop up a lot. It usually means “Get me to the top page of a Google search”. However ‘Online Marketing’ is not so narrow a concept. In fact is part of a general marketing effort and usually has a branding core to it.
The web is where people are searching, researching, running projects and whole businesses. It is where you probably already are, but what may not be obvious is why you bothered in the first place. The page ranking on Google is not going to do you much good if your visitors don’t get you when they get there. It all has to make sense, not to you, but to the end user. In the same way that anything you do off-line also has to make sense. And these days they probably have to make the same kind of sense in an integrated way.
This comes down to brand. I do not mean logo, I mean brand as defined by “…a shared perception of a given thing”. It’s what people know you as, and how comfortable they are with your business. What the Americans call ‘Corporate DNA’ – a classic Americanism, but you get what they mean. It is what you are, what you cannot help being it is making the most of your good bits, improving the not so good bits and engaging with the sort of people who will be attracted to your ‘brand’.
To stop short of becoming a lecture about marketing, simply put, marketing on the web is not much different from marketing anywhere else. However, the execution can be much cheaper. If you can provide a reason to return, by involving your visitors, you create a following. And your followers will become your brand ambassadors without asking for any money in return.
