Place Branding
Place branding is especially close to our hearts – because few things make as big an impact on a person as their relationship to their environment and their community. When a place brand works, it forges bonds between people, revitalises economies, and rallies action on important social and environmental issues.
It’s profoundly rewarding – which is why we’ve found ourselves returning to brand building for urban and regional communities, again and again.
We work collaboratively with citizens, government and businesses to build brands that can make a real social, economic or environmental impact. We help cities, towns and regions with their ambitions for growing investment, tourism, planning and infrastructure development, as well as empowering communities to address environmental challenges and social dislocation.
Locally Grown & Locally Owned
Building, growing and transforming cities, towns or regions is a complex process – because cities, towns and regions are complex systems. But rather than confect an unrealistically simplistic solution focused solely on good news stories, we prefer to dig deep, embrace complexities, and reckon with the very real challenges many communities face. This only works because we work directly with the only people who hold potentially transformative knowledge: the locals.
While we are often “outsiders”, we always take the time to get to know the people of the regions where we work, so our ideas come from authentic sources and offer holistic solutions. This means meeting and collaborating with Governments, businesses (both small and large), tourism and industry bodies, social environmental groups, infrastructure providers, entrepreneurs, potential investors and citizens alike. Then, we ensure locals are themselves able to use the outputs of our work – making them participants, rather than spectators, in the transformation of their community. In short, we’ve found the best way to approach place brands is to make sure they’re locally grown and locally owned.
Different regions have different goals – with different emphasises on investment, tourism, planning, social issues, or infrastructure development. For this reason, we’ve had to develop a wide range of place branding capabilities, that can come into play when needed. Some of our services include:
How We Deliver
Research and Strategy
01
Successfully identifying, defining and deploying the assets of a place is where we start. Putting them together in a way that's visionary, coherent and grounded is what then helps communities mobilise to meet their social, economic and environmental goals. This might come through formal processes (like research and vision setting), public strategy exhibitions, or storytelling sessions with the locals.
Potential elements of this phase:
Community and stakeholder facilitation and engagement
Primary and secondary research
Defining the foundations or DNA of a place
Place visioning
Brand definition and positioning
Value propositions
Communications strategy
Identity Creation
02
Identities aren’t there to look nice (or, rather, not just to look nice) – they should allow local governments, businesses and communities to express themselves with pride and confidence, for tangible impact. We take our inspiration from the people and place, so the community can see and hear themselves in the work that we create with them. These tools we create are versatile and are often open source, so that anyone in the community can use them. When owned by a whole community, the impact of an identity is greatly amplified.
Potential elements of this phase:
Brand identity
Style guide
Launch planning
Brand implementation
Video, print design, environmental design and digital design
Community activations
Storytelling
03
Places are built by people, and the events those people create and experience. And the stories of these experiences, and about these people, is what carries a place into the hearts and minds of others. This only happens when the stories are authentic — which is why we take care to capture real stories that reveal the nuanced character of a place, and are delivered in the authentic tone of the region.
Potential elements of this phase:
Storytelling workshops
Tone of voice
Messaging
Script writing for video
Writing for social and web
Content writing
Investment submissions
04
Coaching
Engagement and participation is essential to the success of the brand (and ensuring the region achieves its long-term goals). While brand guidelines may help establish some rules around how the brand will work, coaching is what fundamentally helps make it come to life in practice.
Potential elements of this phase:
Brand engagement training
Coaching for brand design and writing
Community building and participation
Leadership and stakeholder engagement
RECENT PLACE WORK
WEST COAST TASMANIA
An open-source brand helping 5,000 West Coasters communicate a consistent story to the world.
SNOWY VALLEYS
A celebration of time-consuming craft and timeless nature, to help revitalise a ravaged region.
CITY OF SYDNEY
Evolving our home city’s identity, balancing unity with the flexibility to celebrate diversity.
BLUE MOUNTAINS
A place defined not by its height, but by its depth.
DERWENT VALLEY
A storytelling identity befitting an (oft overlooked) land of quirk and curiosity.
INNER WEST