Branding

Looking through the minutes of the Sheffield Moors Partnership’s Steering Group (obtained through FoI because they are so slow at putting them online**) you can see that the focus in these gatherings of conservation officers has been on presentation and branding. All salesmen know that having a dodgy product means you have to work harder to sell it so they are all keen to get the right pictures and the words and phrases that they hope will resonate with the kind of people who they wish to impress. So, more important than responding to important issues, which get very little attention, they concentrate on how to present and put across their product, the PR of the process.

Members agreed that the masterplan was clear and concise but that the  document will needed more images and the front page needs the SMP logo and branding adding. These can be added before issue to the public.

Branding for the Masterplan

Many ideas were put forward during the meeting. These summarised here.

Video clips on the website.
Artwork to be included in the final document
 Images of what the various areas might look like by 2028.

 Use of SMP logo on front page of masterplan (to be referred to NT design team for advice).

 Needs to differ from Easterm moors and not be ‘NT’ branded.

Web-based consultation and feedback needed

Images required for the consultation period – to use on posters.

Competition for what the public wants the landscape to look like.

Use of QRT codes on poster, postcards etc to link to SMP website for further information.

This leads to a predictable surfeit of adjectivism in the draft Master Plan and there are times when you feel you’re reading the rejected early efforts of an anti-ageing cream commercial or perhaps a 1980s junk food ad.  The intro gives us ‘amazing’ and ‘spectacular’ and ‘very rich’ and ‘wild-flower rich’ and ‘incredibly rich’ and ‘huge passion’ and tells us that the moors “can provide a true sense of wilderness”, (a slight moderation of previous statements mentioning wilderness after criticism from here and elsewhere, using the word 'sense',  though why say ‘true’ when it's demonstrably ‘false’?)
I must look back again because I’ve not yet spotted the word ‘iconic’, normally obligatory in these documents.

Note the buzz words too in the aims of the partnership:

To establish a clear vision and strategic direction, steering delivery across the sites through integrated and holistic planning and thinking.

You might hope that the thinking would precede the planning but you can’t have everything. 

Some may be disappointed not to find  to something along the lines of “This Master Plan helps you to smell like the man every woman wants to meet”. Maybe in the final version; it’s going that way.

Since the draft plan indicates that they intend to 'manage' the wild animals on the site, maybe we'll find that they will all be branded too with multiple ear clips and bright dye splashes or even the letters SMP branded on their sides?

** after earlier FoI's SMP said they would automatically put the Steering group minutes up online on their website. It's just that they take several months to do it.