Cogent Beekeeping: February 2019.

Time flies when you're having fun.

March is upon us, and while January seemed to last forever, February flew by at the speed of light. As we all acted surprised at the number of Easter eggs already on the supermarket shelves (despite it being an annual reoccurrence) and revelled in the highest February temperatures on record, we give you the lowdown on what February had in store for us.

February saw two new starters join the Cogent family. Self-proclaimed coffee snob and dog lover Catherine joins the Growth team as Sales and Marketing Exec – with lots of enthusiasm, she’s already hit the ground running. Andrea has returned for her second spell at Cogent, heading up Project Management. Andrea has come in full speed ahead with lots of great ideas and initiatives. We’re super excited to welcome two great new minds to the team.

Our PR team have also been busy as they headed down to the Garden Press Event with our client Hayter. Held at the Business Designer Centre in London, the team showcased the new Hayter Harrier mower range, as well as the Toro PoweReverse to industry journalists. 

We hosted our very first lunch + learn of the year in Feb. Glug popped by with Illustrator and Designer Katie Browne to give up some top tips on illustration before drawing one-minute portraits of the team. We had lots of fun, and the session even counted towards our CPD programme – one step closer to achieving our IPA gold awards!  

Ahmed also went back to the University of Birmingham to speak at a careers event for budding marketers. He had a thoroughly great day surrounded by lots of passionate and aspiring marketers – who knows, perhaps some of the next Cogent generation were among them.

Meanwhile, our Planning team headed down to London to attend an informative behavioural economics and behavioural change event hosted by WARC. The team gained a great perspective on the crisis of trust and using ethnographic research to explore the sensory experience of crisps (yum!).

That’s not all. We also took GoGo Squeez to national TV – a first for the brand in the UK. Over the last year, we’ve been busy helping GoGo Squeez to establish a brand proposition, creative approach and comms plan to help them launch to the UK ‘mummy’ market. This TV ad is the latest step on that journey and we are super excited to see it live.

Feb had been a hectic, but fun one for our Marston’s team. We created a whole bunch of content for Valentines Day, National Pizza Day and cocktail of the month. We’ve been working hard on a Mother’s Day campaign which sees Marston’s partner with Flying Flowers, while also refreshing a few of the Marston’s websites. That’s not all, we even produced an email campaign and launched two new menus across social media, email, web and more! We loved every single second of it and have lots more to come this month!

We all took part in the latest #TogetherWeAre. We had a week (40 hours) to crack the code to get into the giant jar of Creme Eggs. However, to the amusement of the rest of the team, it only took Jordan five hours to exercise his rather worrying ‘talent’ of ‘picking locks’. The challenge may have been cut just a tad short, but we forgave him… he did share the chocolate, after all!

We rounded up the month interviewing and chatting with the attendees at the Commercial Vehicle Show Media Day at the NEC. As one of our B2B clients, we’ve been having lots of fun developing the theme for the show in April and have been busy managing their digital communications throughout the year. 

So as you can tell, it was a busy month here at HQ, but it’s been a blast. We’re looking forward to March, the daffodils coming into bloom and flipping pancakes (unsuccessfully no doubt), before drenching them in Nutella and unregretfully overindulging. Until next time, that’s all of us.