New to the streets of Moscow is the Artoil Petrol Station which was opened in the smart Rublevka district on the 8th of July this year. According to David Davis of designers Minale Tattersfield, the new design ‘Was intended to provide the Russian motorist with the highest level of service within a bright and cheerful environment that clearly put the motorist first’.
As a market Russia has matured to a level where western levels of presentation are becoming expected and even exceeded in certain cases. BP and Lukoil set the standard in the late 90’s and from 2000 onwards and more recently Rosneft and Gazpromneft.

The Artoil brand was conceived to raise the bar further and was created collaboratively with owners Ilona and Rishat Safin to be credible for technological products such as fuel and car wash whilst be equally applicable for the highly profitable convenience and ‘Food to go’ sector. The Artoil name communicates the quirky boutique nature of the positioning plus is derived from the old Kartoil stations which in past years provided a venue for Cart racing enthusiasts.


Artoil differentiates itself within the market with a bold use of colour which is designed to be both highly visible and provide a welcome refuge during long, cold and grey winters. Colours feature inside the store too with a sit down and ‘Food to go’ offer named Kraski Kafe (colours cafe). The ubiquitous downmarket white grid tiled ceiling was deliberately rejected in favour of a more characterful and atmospheric design where a large timber elliptical lowered ceiling feature makes a dramatic and differentiating statement.

Artoil’s management were aware that they were totally new to market and were naturally anxious that they could attract customers from leading brands such as Lukoil. In the event trading figures for both fuel and C-store are significantly higher than the previous Lukoil station that the Artoil design replaced. Local office workers especially are happy to spend break times in the ‘Art Market’ drinking coffee or topping up their weekly shopping.

What came first the pencil or the scribble?

Winning a D&AD (Design and Art Directors) award for creative excellence is the aspiration of nearly every creative agency in the world. It is the ‘benchmark’ to which all designers, young and old look to for justification, reward and recognition – it defines who they are, what they do and why they do it.

The association was founded in 1962 by a group of London-based designers & art directors that included David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes (who designed the original D&AD logo).

In 1962 Marcello Minale Snr and Brian Tattersfield (our founding partners) met at Y&R (Young and Rubicam). In 1963 they joined D&AD after winning their first D&AD award (a certificate). The following year Marcello Minale Snr and Brain Tattersfield decided to leave Y&K and start their own agency, appropriately called Minale Tattersfield. Their first commission was to create an identity for themselves (the Scribble) and shortly afterwards they volunteered to design a more prestigious award for D&AD. What they created was a beautiful ebony pencil box, which contained a pencil with silver lettering. It was a thing of beauty but too delicate, so in 1966 Lou Klein designed the more durable yellow pencil we have today.

Today, D&AD has grown in membership and reaches out across the world. Although the day to day running of the association is handled by a dedicated team, they take their leadership from an appointed executive of leading design and advertising practitioners. The executive is elected by the association’s members every 3 or so years.

This year, in 2010, Marcello Minale’s son, also called Marcello Minale has stood for this year’s election. It’s a bit like history doing full circle and perhaps if appointed, we will finally find out if it was the pencil that inspired the scribble or the other way round.

If you are a D&AD member and want to cast your vote, you can do so by visiting http://www.dandad.org/category/about/

Thanks for reading!

Last week I was walking out of Liverpool Street station to meet a friend at one of those 'trendy' Shoreditch bars and I walked past one of the newly installed docking stations for the Mayor’s new cycle scheme. I stopped a while to look over this new piece of street furniture since it has received so much publicity in the press and not least because our agency did a lot of the preliminary design work. I was not alone in giving the bikes and the pay box the once over. Other people were walking round the bikes and pointing and prodding as well.

Having lived with the scheme over several months, as one of TfL's (Transport for London) design roster agencies, it was a real joy to see the scheme in the flesh. Since our work the scheme had obtained a sponsor, Barclays Bank, and the cycles were standing there resplendent in their new Barclays' blue livery. The cycles themselves look very robust. I understand they each cost a few hundred pounds.

This scheme is just what this traffic choked city needs and I am sure it will be very successful. When I walked past, several of the docking points were empty so several of the bikes were already being used. I was very tempted to take one out myself and impress my friend of my green credentials by cycling to the restaurant but then again I am not sure that there would have been a docking station at the other end. I made a mental note to get a map of where all the docking stations were.

Thanks for reading!

You can see the TfL Cycle hire work we did by visiting our site: http://www.minaletattersfield.com/

Location, location, location - the oldest cliché in the book about Retail. Get the right outlet with the right products in the right place and the customers and the profits just roll in! And in the petroleum sector it has to be even truer surely. Right road, right traffic flow, well positioned petrol station - Bingo! Well yes of course location is vital - that's why the real estate costs so much when a site on a busy highway or on a motorway is released or sold. But as every retailer knows the trick is always to maximise the returns - to secure volume and income which exceeds expectations and provides business higher than the "case" assumption (the assumption that underpinned the original investment). This article is about that extra, that bonus level of return that can turn a good site or network into a great one.
One of the basic rules of retail is that it has to be process driven. Securing and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction does not happen by chance – especially in petroleum retailing. This means that the “offer” has not only to meet the customers’ needs but also to be consistent over time. Any fool can get a consumer to try a product or service once – but to bring them back time and time again you have to repeat the quality, and precisely replicate the purchase experience, every time. This requires performance standards – standards which cover every aspect of the motorist’s visit to the petrol station. Where, as is invariably the case, sites are part of a branded network your standards must cover the network as a whole. Most oil companies have some flagship sites in prime locations on which they lavish special care and attention. There is nothing wrong with this – providing that the minimum standards which apply elsewhere in the network meet, or preferably exceed, customer expectations. Consistency of the marketing offer is vital.
Vertically integrated oil companies, those that operate all the way along the supply chain from the wellhead to the motorist, are driven by processes. Technical and performance standards apply at every step in the chain – so it is not surprising that there is generally, in principle, an acceptance of the need for standards in their retailing operations as well. I say “in principle” advisedly because my personal experience in Shell, and my observation of other oil companies, is that particularly in recent years there is an unwillingness to make the financial commitment in retail that would facilitate the achievement of consistently high levels of customer service. The principal reason for this is that whereas other retailers are customer obsessed – the success of a Wal-Mart or a Tesco is built on the foundation of a fixation with customers – this hardly ever applies to traditional oil companies. This is part of the reason that supermarket and hypermarket chains have made such inroads into petroleum retailing. When the board of a supermarket giant meets virtually every subject discussed is placed in the context of its effect on customer preference and consumer choice. When the boards of Shell or BP or ExxonMobil meet there retail business is low down the agenda – if it is there at all – and the customer rarely gets a look in.

This brings us to the question as to whether retail is or should be a core competence for a vertically integrated oil company. Back in 1996 I moved, with Shell, to the Middle East – based in Dubai. My previous job had been as project manager for the re-imaging of Shell’s more than 40,000 petrol stations around the world – so I considered myself something of an expert on branded retailing in the petroleum sector and I thought also that Shell had created a new, distinctive and customer-driven set of design and operational standards. What immediately surprised me in Dubai is how high the general standards of petroleum retailing were - and all the brands were local brands. For example Emarat, a Dubai company, had a new design and associated forecourt standards which were, frankly, just as good as what we had just developed for Shell. The key point about Emarat is that they are first and foremost a consumer focused marketing company. Of course in a country like the United Arab Emirates, with its huge oil reserves, there are also major upstream companies but the nation’s oil marketing brands are decoupled from their upstream activities. Like Tesco or Wal-Mart, Emarat and their competitors are 100% focused on their motorist and other customers. This I believe is also the model for the future for the multinationals like Shell and BP.

The reality is that the main raison d’être of a vertically integrated oil major these days has to be the upstream. Most of their investment and almost all of their energies are focused on this sector – particularly at Board level. Although the marketing businesses of these companies are large, and their brands have traditionally been strong, whatever advantage there once was has gradually been whittled away by the supermarket chains. The consumer brands are also damaged by completely unrelated issues and problems in the upstream – as BP has recently seen to their cost. So the crucial decision that Shell and BP and the rest must take is whether they do still see marketing, and especially retail, as a core business and if so how they should restructure to give it far more emphasis than it can receive when most of the corporation’s efforts are on the upstream. Core businesses demand the development of distinctive core competences – peripheral businesses, however notionally large, wither on the vine because the core competences are absent or insufficiently developed.

There is a window of opportunity for Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total etc to focus on what they do best – the upstream – and realise the value of their marketing businesses and brands. There are plenty of models which could be followed to do this of which probably the best would be the one chosen some years ago by British Gas plc when they formed two separate companies, one essentially upstream (BG Group) and the other a marketing business - Centrica. If there is residual value in the brands such as BP, Amoco, Shell, Total, Texaco, Esso, Mobil, Elf and the rest then the creation of dedicated downstream companies to manage these brands entirely separately from the upstream is essential. The question as to whether retail is a core competence would then never need to be asked. Retail would be the main business, the public face and the raison d’être of these new companies – and their management would have to be just as customer obsessed as their supermarket competitors!


Paddy Briggs

July 2010

© Minale Tattersfield

Belgium is world famous for the quality of its chocolate so when 10 Belgian masters of chocolate join together to showcase their art you know that something impressive is about to happen.

Best Belgian Chocolate of the World is a non profit making organisation dedicated to protecting and promoting the expertise of Belgian chocolate making. They decided to set up a retail outlet where the art of the Belgian ‘chocolatier’ could be experienced at first hand. It was to be a place not only where chocolate could be purchased but where one could see the chocolate being made and witness the skills of the chocolate masters.


Minale Tattersfield design strategy created the branding from the name “La Maison des Maîtres Chocolatiers Belges” right through to the interior design.

The visual identity design was expressed very simply in line with the whole concept itself. A light blue and a brown were the colours used in the identity and this was then followed through in the design of the communication material and the in-store point of sale. The simplicity of the design and the use of brown throughout really emphasise the purity of the recipes and the ‘love’ of chocolate.