Corporate branding, inappropriate behaviour and following the dream

 

A weird thing came over me on Tuesday: I had a sudden urge to clear out my wardrobes in the middle of my working day.  Trancelike, I climbed the stairs.  Then, like a woman possessed, I began a three hour tirade of climbing up and down the step ladder and chucking stuff around the room.  Amongst the treasures I recovered from the wardrobe tops was a bag of Steven’s old press cuttings.

I married a child actor thinking I’d live the celebrity lifestyle.  Of course, he wasn’t a child when we met – behaves like it sometimes though!  (Oh, I am going to be in trouble…)  I posted the press cuttings on Facebook to an incredible response.  If only he’s carried on down that path…
The roads we choose in life are rarely the ones we imagine setting out on.  We begin our journey then have to make decisions at every fork or crossroads.  It was a course of snap judgements that led me away from my place at art college and, more recently, into social media consulting.


But the art dream is still there.  I’m taking part in two art exhibitions later this year with Martyn and, although I’m writing poetry to complement his paintings, my desire to be more creative is growing and I’m determined to follow that dream (one day!).  I tweet a lot about design and one of my favourite recent retweets was a branding colour chart showing corporate logos and the meanings of their colour choices.

I really should have purple branding – it’s the colour of imagination, creativity and good witchcraft!  Also of Cadbury’s…  And, I did, in fact, have a purple logo for fifteen years!! I only changed it last year when I created my current website, changing it then to turquoise.  This greeny-blue shade is the colour of trust and strength, bordering on the floaty hues of peace.

The lovely dress

Interestingly, a glance at my iPhone shows almost all my most used social media icons are blue: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, WordPress, Dropbox, Mailchimp.  So that’s ok.  It makes sense that someone who trains people to use social media effectively would also be blue.  But that’s not why I chose it.  For those of you who’ve joined me in the past year, I previously had a photo on my homepage wearing a turquoise evening dress… I simply worked the colourway around that.  No sophisticated creative concepts, just me and a dress I love!

But then again, clearing out my wardrobe proved that I have ten purple dresses!!  I also have a purple Pinterest page… So I do feel like I should go back to purple branding now…. What do you think?  I wore purple for one of my trips into London this week.  It was the hottest day of the week and the tube was sweltering.  It never ceases to amaze me that a country that limits the number of people in nightclubs for health and safety reasons, allows almost four million people a day to squash into little metal carriages with soaring temperatures and a lack of oxygen, to be plummeted up to 220 feet below street level.  It’s a disaster waiting to happen.  Again.

Anyway, on this particular purple day, the woman opposite me was indiscreetly breastfeeding and the man next to me started touching himself.  Nice.  Inappropriate behaviour always makes an interesting start to the day.   The king of purple says, “Honey I know, I know, I know times are changing; it’s time we all reach out for something new – that means you too.”  If you’re reaching for something new (not on the train!), let me help you promote it – social media marketing that gets your business noticed.  Ask me here: @WeekendWitch.