The Dutch Financial Times (Financieel Dagblad) interviewed Nawaz about MiU Marketing and our goal to enrich consumers lives through marketing.

Sheraz and I joined another battle in the Battle of Concepts, a platform where students are asked to come up with concepts for issues for (public) organizations and the government. In every battle, prizes are divided among the top 20.

In the most recent battle, the Fund for Employment & Education asked us to come up with tools to support officials to recognize and fight against upcoming work overload and stress.

Sheraz and I came up with an application for smartphones and tablets, which officials could use to become more aware of their (mental) overload. This application would be linked to bio-feedback tools, to have both subjective and objective feedback.

Our solution reached the 9th place.

An overview of all our battles:

Green Knowledge Centre – 3rd (November 2010) Stimulating sharing knowledge online.

Labour Inspection – Top 20 (December 2010) Creating a tool to prevent agression and violence against public officials

NOS ['the Dutch BBC'] – No prices (January 2011) Creating a name for the new NOS platform. NOS decided to stick to their old name.

Euroforum, the conference company – Top 20 (January 2011) Develop a new format for workshops for young professionals.

Fund for Employment & Education - Top 10 (Februari 2011) Create a tool to support officials to recognize and prevent work overload and stress.

We’ve got some ‘hot’ news: next week, we’ll start a project for Luxor, an all-you-can-eat restaurant. Luxor is an amazing venue with more than 300 seats on two floors. They prepare and serve the fresh food from an open kitchen and are opened for both lunch and diner. Luxor used to be a theater before it turned into a cinema. After a great restyling, this listed building has transformed into a fresh and modern restaurant. The classical look and ambiance are still in touch though. Keep you updated.

Next week, one of us will attend at the seminar “Invisible influencing”. Dutch top speech and language psychologist Pacelle van Goethem (amongst others) will tell about how to use (body) language to influence people. Yesterday, I interviewed her. I just posted the interview on Molblog (in Dutch).

Omar Munie is living the Dutch dream. As a succesful young entrepreneur his products are available in New York, Dubai and London. Hilary Clinton has one of his bags. Next to working hard to continue building his brand, he also travels through The Netherlands to promote Dutch education, along with minister Marja van Bijsterveldt.

We will start a project with a focus on social media in February. Keep you posted.

We joined another Battle of Concepts last month. This time the Dutch ‘labour inspection’ put out an assignment. We had to come up with a breakthrough service or product that will encourages employees in the public sector to report aggressive behavior and violence of the attendance. We ended up 11th. Although we (obviously) aimed for a higher ranking, we were very satisfied.

Hereby we officially (and proudly) present our restyled, refreshed, and upgraded branding. We launched a new interactive website and integrated it with our blog “Blowing minds”, which, of course, also was subject to the fresh brand guidelines.

To continue, we made sure all our social media were in style, so we thoroughly run through our Facebook fan page and our personal Facebook pages ^SK & ^NK (take a look at the various tabs). Did the same for LinkedIn (where Nawaz launched a new group recently for professionals interested in applying psychology). Then checked SlideShare (presenting ourselves in a couple of slides), updated FlickR (a bunch of new photographs), continuously fill Delicious with various interesting URL’s, uploaded our first brand film production on YouTube & Vimeo, and last but not least our Twitteraccounts @sherazkazmi @nawazkazmi & @miumarketing.

Not only did we develop our online presence, we care about our real, offline presence too. So, with the artwork as a starting point, MiU’s hardcopy brand elements, consisting of business cards and document cover paper, were realized. You really need to experience the ‘look-and-feel’. Want to look, want to feel? We’ll send you a business card as soon as you dropped us your contact-details.

Oh yeah, we also started a contest!
Visit our fan page on Facebook and join in to WIN a bottle of Champagne!

We wish u an unforgettable Xmas & a BOOMING 2011!

Do you know Battle of Concepts? As an innovation platform, it crowdsources the collective intelligence of students and young professionals in The Netherlands. Corporations and public organizations can capitalize on the community by placing issues and contests when they look for fresh energy and inspiration in the form of innovative concepts. It’s all about marketing 3.0.

Sheraz and I joined the game six weeks ago. In that battle, young pro’s were asked to think up concepts to stimulate knowledge sharing in the green sector. Sheraz came up with this innovative 3.0 idea, which is grounded in the real world AND uses the power of the digital era.

And well, they liked our concept: it brought us the 3rd place (Dutch). We will tell you more about the battle soon!

NedLab is an independent laboratory, existing for over ten years, operating mainly in The Netherlands. To expand their business gradually, they’ve asked us to manage an online marketing campaign. We will start optimizing the website text for search engines. Then we will implement Google AdWords, apply web analytics, and of course optimize the process. No doubt we will make use of all the psychological techniques we possess, like the ones of Cialdini.

We’ll keep you posted!

This week, we cleanly and neatly finished this small project for a laundry service company. The guys had some serious plans to expand and decided to boost their professionality. Our job to work on their branding. First, we created a logo and we came up with a new slogan:

Daily. Good

For you to decide if it gives you the right associations.

Next, we implemented the logo and slogan a business card and some other expressions. Next, we created a compact, but complete, to-the-point website, based on the offline branding. Want to know more, check out the portfolio.