This week was a final week, in which we had our final board room session at the Park Inn Hotel in the center of York. 

After doing user research we wanted to define our audience a little further, and decided to create personas for the types of people who may use our app to gain a better insight to our audiences needs and wants and what they would gain from using our app.



Our first persona is named Eduardo and is a 19 year old 1st year student at York St John University, and is living in University halls. Eduardo is outgoing and has a lot of friends, enjoys going out and is part of the university football team and enjoys spending with the team, going to their weekly socials and can spend a lot of money while on a night out. He's also very active on social media and has accounts on most sites including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Our next persona is Alice, a 20 year old second year student who is studying Primary Education in Leeds. She drives to and from her placement, which is at a Primary School in York. She has recently moved into a shared house with a few of her university friends, has a part time job and enjoys going to the cinema and going out to nice restaurants. Like Eduardo, she has accounts on most social medias, has accounts on Facebook and Instagram to keep up with her friends, and her family back home.

Our final persona is Viktor, a 21 year old creative writing student from Sweden, studying in York for a semester. He is living in University halls with a few other international students and with his flatmates, wants to learn about and experience the English culture. He likes going out to town at night and visiting bars and clubs, has recently joined the hockey team and is enjoying their socials and events. He is also an active user of facebook, using it to keep in contact with his family and friends back home.

Within our brand research we found that digital technology is a key part of branding and helps with building recognition, as it allows social media to play a key art in establishing a brand identity, assisting in bringing success to a brand.

To maintain our brand identity we created social media accounts for our brand, building a platform to communicate with consumers. Evans (2012) states that 'social media sits at the pinnacle of the current trends in consumer-to-consumer conversation and marketing amplification', so naturally we felt if important to create a social media presence.

We created both Twitter and Facebook accounts to gain online presence and be able to communicate with a range of audiences. Facebook has the most active social media site, according to LifeWire (2017) with Twitter following close behind. Having a Twitter account also allows us to communicate with other brands, gaining inspiration for our own and improving our own brand, whether it be through communication or getting feedback from others.

Creating an online presence is key for the branding process, as it establishes is a brand image, so we used our logo and colour scheme throughout to become recognisable and familiar with consumers.








Evans, D. (2012) Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. New Jersey, Wiley.

LifeWire (2017) The Top Social Media Sites People Are Using. [Internet] Available from https://www.lifewire.com/top-social-networking-sites-people-are-using-3486554 [Accessed 27th March 2017]

This week's session was on PR, public relations, and it's function within the industry. PR is generally the main "in between" factor with the company and whatever audience it might have. For example a company may set up a PR department and that department would deal with customers, local authorities, media (like the press) and shareholders, just to name a few examples. One way PR might communicate is with a press release. PR has changed over the years, the old saying; "sex sells" is found to be exactly that; old. It's not sex that sells these days it's activism, from TV adverts to a company tweeting their support for the ape currently in the White House, activism and politics has a bigger impact then sex. One prime example is the Lyft vs. Uber "event" wherein Uber denounces protesters protesting against the travel ban, people delete the Uber  their phones as a moral gesture, their competitor, Lyft, announce that they're giving money to a civil rights foundation, Lyft surpasses Uber downloads for the first time.

In addition, this week we spent time to bring all of our recent material together into a new presentation to be given on the 30th.

This week we had a session on project management from media industry professional, Marie Thouaille. During this we were introduced to several concepts and tools that are key to project management, such as; the project life cycle, S.W.O.T. analysis, scope management, stakeholder management and Gantt charts.

The project lifecycle is a broad plan that can be applied to most projects, in the session we focused only on two of the four stages in the project lifecycle: Define it and Design it. We moved on to S.W.O.T. analysis, S.W.O.T. analysis is a structured analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of anything from projects to products and brands.We were set to work on our own S.W.O.T. analysis chart and decided to use our rebranding task as the focus of it. 


The rebranding of Tesco was the focus of all the tasks set in this session. Next we defined the scope of our rebranding, it’s important to define scope clearly so you have a clear cut idea of what you have to do and to avoid “scope creep”, the constant adding of new ideas that will throw your project off balance.

Our scope for Tesco Rebrand: The project to create and develop a TV advertisement campaign for the brand Tesco, to make it more memorable and modern in todays market.

After that we went on to stakeholder management, stakeholder management is used to figure out exactly who has interest and/or influence over the project process or outcomes. To apply this to our Tesco rebranding task we created a chart, similar to the S.W.O.T. analysis chart, and mapped the influence and interest of the various types of people connected with our project.


Lastly we were told about Gantt charts; a chart, similar to a bar graph, that lays out the duration of the project and divides the time up among the different parts and actions needed to be completed. They’re typically used to make sure the time given to a project is used efficiently, so the project gets done in a timely fashion and doesn't run over the deadline.

 The above screenshots show the first screen the user sees when they open the app. There are many positive features and aspects to the app and the home screen is one of hem, the screen is blue if the user is sticking to the budget, while it turns orange if the user is low on money. This is one feature we enjoyed as it is very visual, and easy to see if you are not sticking to the

After our session on Habit Forming Products, we were asked to look at Duolingo and discuss how it uses habit forming.

The website is simple and there is a trigger on the center of the page as soon as you enter the website, and it instantly catches the attention of the audience. The words state 'Learn a language for free. Forever' is a strong call to action for the user, drawing them in with its persuasive language and use of full stops, telling the user rather than asking or inviting them.


Within the app itself there are many app triggers, including create account and sign, which are common in most apps that require an account. The trigger of choosing a language to learn, however, is unique to the app because of it's purpose and offers a reward of knowledge and language. The concept of giving rewards from a trigger is something we can apply to our own app in some way, as it gives the user satisfaction and makes them more likely to use the app more. Triggers can be used in many ways, to get the user to come back to the app again and again, whether that be by physical rewards, the exchange of information or the ability to communicate or interact with the app and it's other users in some way, such as a 'like' button.

Our app will help students with budgeting and offer rewards  in the form of deals, satisfaction of saving money and knowledge of how to save money and budget in the future. Our app will solve the problems that many students face, especially when living away from home, including saving money, spending too much or not having enough money to live on. Our app will do this by teaching them how to budget effectively.

To understand target audience more we decided to hold a survey asking students about their opinions and emotions towards money, and to understand their needs and wants more.

We had twenty participants in our survey, which we sent to students using social media, and it asked questions about student finance and budgeting, as we wanted to learn about their attitudes and feelings about these topics to help us with our app development.

We had 20 students take part, answering questions about student finance and budgeting.

We first asked if they struggled living off their student loan and 55% said yes, proving that they struggle and would benefit from an app like ours, which would help them budget their money.

Next we asked if they have ever budgeted before, if they currently budget and if they manage to stick to their decided budget and found that of the 75%, only just over 50% of them manage to stick to their decided budget.

We asked more about their attitudes about money and found that 100% of our participants worry about money and the majority feel that their mental health and their studies suffer as a side effect of these worries.

This information further evidenced to use that a budgeting app would have an audience and be helpful for these students to calm their money worries and concerns.



We asked then what they spend the most of their money on and found that most students spend the most of their student loan on Bills, food, rent and travel, so we can use this information to adjust the deals and budgeting tips on our own app to help them with buying these products while still having money for other things.

finally we asked if they would download a budgeting app for students and found that 85% would at least download and try it. This proves to us that there is a valid window for a budgeting app and there is a market for it. This survey allows us to further understand our audience to build our app effectively for them in particular.

This week we brought everything we'd done, all our progress, together in a presentation that we presented to the rest of the Media Enterprise group.

After the presentation we noticed as a group that we wanted to focus on our design element of our company by developing our app further and completing ideas within the company such as representation as a brand and marketing. Overall we are all pleased with our process so far and are excited about our progress.

Week 3 and headway was made with the logo and brand names. As mentioned in a previous post; we investigated the process that company goes through when choosing brand names. After a while brainstorming, individual thinking and reflection, considering existing names and reference books, we narrowed the list of potential names down to 9: Upal, Unipal, Edge, Fixer, Dentless, Sense, Fuse Media, Tone Media, Neon.

We in the group decided on the name "Edge" as it was a simple, single syllable, word that was both memorable and easy to say (taking non English speakers into consideration).

Development of a Logo was pursued this week by Emily and Philippa, a more detailed account of their process can be found in a separate blog post but the general thrust development of the logo was uniqueness. It was found in research that blue and red were common, recurring colours in most logos so a similarly bold colour that is seldom used was considered. Purple fell into this category nicely.

In our first session with Craig Walton, we had to consider initial ideas for our company name and was introduced to the programme, InDesign, which is appropriate for many uses including designing a logo.

We all came up with one idea for a company name which we thought would link with our values as a company and our target audience of students. After designing a rough design of our chosen company name on InDesign we joined back as a group to discuss which was the most preferred between the group. We chose to develop Philippa's idea of 'Edge' further as we thought it would relate to our young demographic and would give us the opportunity to be creative with fonts, colours and overall design.

'EDGE' - As we decided on our company name, we then decided to split the tasks of designing the company logo and further research into our app. George and Alex continued to research and develop our app ideas and myself and Philippa began designing our company logo. I firstly looked at other company logos to get an idea of what is the dominant colours used as a company we wanted to be unique and did not want to go for popular colour schemes.

Google search results of Company Logos.

The colours red and blue are recurring colour in logos in which we wanted to differ from as a company ourselves. I decided to go for a vibrant purple and white as I thought those colours worked well together and would appeal to our target audience. By using the website http://www.dafont.com  we used that to get unique fonts to create a original logo and I used the font named Edge Caps. With an initial idea with what I wanted it to look like on screen I managed to get a this design below however I want to develop my own design further to make it look more professional and recognisable by maybe working more with the diamond shape.

After doing initial research about existing brand names and branding, we investigated the process that company goes through when choosing brand names. There are many factors that go into choosing a logo, including the consideration of desirable properties, including connotations, relevance and memorability. There are also branding objectives, including establishing a particular image, identifying a target market, fostering brand loyalty and market segmentation. We found that brands use a branding criteria when choosing their brand name, including compatibility with the product image, memorability and trademark availability, as brands cannot share the same name as another.