I’m currently designing a recruitment poster/flyer and whilst looking for inspiration came across the Army Cadet Brand Centre that has a series of pre-designed editable flyers and posters.
Why do we not have anything like this, as an ATC search brings up 100’s of local copies with no consistency. We recently had the new poster for Officers, but there has been no updated content for cadet recruitment that I have seen since the introduction of the RAF AC brand or the change in recruitment age.
HQAC seems to be pretty terrible at media & Recruitment.
Looking through the ACO Recruitment Interim Report (slide 7) it seems like they are working on some recruitment resources.
Edit: I assume you’ve seen the thread from earlier this year as well? Recruitment Posters
For years we’ve done our own thing and included pictures of cadets doing things. This works as when we’ve had a few people turn up for the presentation evening and nodded recognition at some of the cadets.
We do it at work for our services as well and apart from a company logo don’t go overboard on corporate identity.
Cohesive branding below HQAC level is something we seriously lack.
They did produce the okay-ish (if you can get past the errors) Corporate Style Guide a few years ago when the current logo was introduced. Though it was quickly removed from Sharepoint because they’d used the wrong logo.
That at least went part way towards the need - establishing a colour pallet and giving guidance on the use of the logo, but there is definitely a lot more that could be done to keep brand consistent amongst squadrons.
The trouble with everyone doing their own thing is that there are far too many people who fancy themselves as graphic designers and who think they can knock something out in Word or Powerpoint.
I’ve seen some utter toss turned out! It doesn’t present the image of a professional organization at all.
If it works does it matter?
The aim of advertising / promotional material is attracting business at a reasonable cost and this day and age using some sort of software. Local businesses put posters and leaflets and thrive without the aid / bonus of ‘professionals’?
I got corporate leaflets through the Corps years ago and put sticky labels on them to cover up national contact details with our details and then thought the pictures were bog standard, bland, posed, grinning ninny corporate type pictures of youngsters and wanted something more pertinent to us. In my opinion if you have pictures of your cadets and staff on things and people recognise them it adds something. We take some posed ‘wedding’ type pictures but a lot more candid ‘action’ photos, which show people actually doing things. The likes of ATC social media wouldn’t get anywhere without pictures of cadets and at sqn level, that means their cadets and staff, not corporate pictures.
But the over-riding fact is not very many people who enquire about being staff are doing it on a whim from seeing a glossy advert or getting all excited about a logo or colour palette on some leaflet or poster. We do most of our staff recruiting from ex-cadets who want to ‘put something back’ who are already numbed to the Corps’ ways or parents of current cadets or ex-military, it’s not very often you get someone come along to be staff who have no connection or knowledge no matter how vague and attracted by a logo.
People who give money to us at sqn level don’t do it because of some logo or colour palette they do it because they want to fund local youth and mostly because the experience them doing things for them.