Weekly Reflection.

Secondary Research and lacking motivation...
 As it stands the deadline is looming for this project, and as I have mentioned before I feel as though I may have over estimated the amount of work I can compete to the standard I am happy with. Looking at the master brief, along with my own detailed lists as long as my arms, I see myself drowning in work meaning that I had lost momentum and motivation for a period of time. Battling through this and working on my secondary research I produced a case study based on an internet article this was my blog post titled 'KIKO's Success' (here). When looking into makeup brands and the current competitors I found as though theres so many to look at and so much information to absorb, meaning I needed to narrow my searches down slightly. So I started this by exclusively looking into national brands, and those of which came up in the Top 10 Brands in the U.K. Why I chose the brand KIKO was because when I was researching into brands and pricing, KIKO sat in-between what we would class as 'Hight Street of High End' products. I wanted to investigate what puts them above others and is this having an influence/ knock on effect to other well known brands? if so why and how.

The thing that I was most intrigued about this case study I produced was that it is inspiring the other brands in the top 10 to change their ways, it also allowed me to investigate into why perhaps their products can range form cheaper to more expensive, and does their packaging (more bland, dark colours) come into the price?

 After I had produced this case study it opened up a whole new can of worms that I needed to research for this project, why their prices range so much? does the packaging effect the prices? Is it the same for some of the higher end brands? so on and so forth. Despite this I decided I needed to focus now on the physical project and the practicality of getting my packaging professionally printed and made, as this would look better than if I were to do this myself. I made a blog post names 'Cosmetic Packaging To Order'. This was one of the research articles that took a lot more time than I had anticipated. When it came to my FMP last year, I found printing a magazine was very easy, whether it be online or in a physical shop, the prices were good as was the service. However because of what I want to create this year it was a little bit more difficult to find UK based brands that were cheap, and also allowed you to order some packaging under the quantity of 200!
 As I briefly mentioned in that blog post I think as long as I have all of my digital visuals and everything produced I will be happy, I think that the marking board and tutors will be able to see why I might not be able to have them physically printed to a high standard as it is just something that is really difficult to have made, so I will try not to focus and worry on that too much.

Soon after completing this crucial research I was able to look back on the questionnaire I had produced, to find I had 31 responses which was a number I was happy to work with, especially when it came to looking at the submitted responses and the variety of answers I had! I decided to produce an infographic in order to show my results in a more visual way especially as my whole project is based on visuals and creativity! I also put all of the answers into a spreadsheet too, as this way it was easy to look at ALL of the responses to compare and contrast them. 

Lastly what I want to discuss in this post is the moodboard for the colour palette I created. This can all be read into great depth over in that particular post here but as is stands I need to get a wriggle on for my mood boards. As of right now I want to still look into potential box / packaging, that will be done through existing products and looking at the wire variety or the different brands, along with brief research into brand prices for the same products and what the difference is between them (i.e more extravagant packaging = more expensive? or are people paying for the brand name due to those linked and associated with the brand). In addition to this I also want to look into websites that sell branded products (asos?) along with YouTube and the way in which advertising is done through that particle platform. Once I have looked at all of these I will then be happy to move on to looking at advertisement posters and banners to get inspiration for my own work, then allowing me to move off from the research side of the project and begin my visuals and creating!