PASSION and honesty are the secrets to establishing yourself as a brand in the food and drink business.

That was the view expressed by the people behind some of Dorset’s best-known success stories at the Mike Warne Annual Marketing Communications lecture at Bournemouth University.

The event, organised by final year marketing students, this year focused on the county’s food and drink brands. The guest speakers were not marketers by profession, but were bound up with the values of their brand.

Former labourer Jim Cregan set up Jimmy’s Iced Coffee with his sister Suzie after travelling in Australia and experiencing iced coffee there.

“It already existed here; it had been on the shelf for about seven years, but I didn’t like the branding, the packaging, the ingredients of any of them,” he said.

“If I could have got my fix that would have been fine, but it just wasn’t satisfying and I needed to get exactly the same feeling that I had from the one that I had in Oz – which wasn’t just a taste and a flavour.

“You know when you see something that’s quite rare and you go ‘Yes!’, like when you see an old classic car on the road – that’s what I wanted to represent, that feeling of ‘Yes I’ve found it’.”

He added: “If I go in and talk to someone, hopefully you’re going to want to try one of my products after I’ve spoken about it because I just feel so strongly about it. You can’t just learn that, it’s got to come from something.”

Mark Cribb, owner of several successful businesses including the Urban Reef restaurant and Urban Beach hotel, said his brand strategy had been to “just tell the truth”.

“I’ve always been a fan of honesty in my brand,” he said.

“There’s no doubt in the last nine years we’ve evolved a lot. We had a very run-down old B&B in Boscombe.

“Now, nine years later, we employ 120 staff, our payroll is over £100,000 a month, we’ve got four venues, we’ve got land where we grow our produce, so I guess with no strategy or marketing plan or knowledge or experience, we do appear to be here.”

Anna Rosier, managing director of Christchurch baby food company Organix, said: “What really I want to talk about today is about having a really clear mission, a really clear purpose and running that through your culture, the activities that you do and then the brands that you are and that’s what people really believe in.

“It’s about turning a problem that you see in society into actions that your business then delivers and then out of that is the brand it becomes.”

Anne Godfrey, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing – which has been going through a rebranding of its own – said of the event: “What I love is it shows that SMEs, microbusinesses, do marketing and don’t even know they’re doing it.

“Jimmy [Cregan] is his own personal brand. Meet him and you get the brand experience. He walks, talks, breathes it. I think it shows any company of any size can do this, it’s just that the bigger ones have the luxury of being able to pay for professional marketing, professional agencies.”

Andy Parker, Dorset chairman of the CIM, said he had been consistently impressed by Bournemouth’s marketing graduates. Colin Merrett, programme leader for the marketing degree, said 95 per cent of the course’s students had a job in marketing within six months of graduating.

Emily McTavish, chairman of the students’ organising committee, said the aim had been to tell a story about how brands are created.

“It comes so naturally to people like Jimmy, it just flows out of him, and for us learning, that’s what we all aspire to be like – to have these fantastic ideas and put those ideas into practice,” she added.