Bringing together the business community and driving positive change in Lancaster through brand development, design and communications, for not-for-profit organisation Lancaster Business Improvement District (BID)
The Brief
Lancaster BID is a city centre business-funded and business-led body that delivers initiatives to drive footfall and make Lancaster a success for local businesses and the community.
Following the successful ballot for another five years of Lancaster BID, the organisation approached us looking to appoint an agency to complete design and marketing-related activities to support its work over the next three years.
We understood the need for a flexible design partner that could deliver against the organisation’s varied needs, but we also recognised that all work needed to be built to deliver Lancaster BID’s ‘Five Year Five Goals’ business plan and communicate its work across all those areas.
We concluded that our consultancy needed to go beyond design. We needed to focus on how Lancaster BID operates, looks, and sounds as an organisation and across all five of its goals, to reinvigorate the brand across all touchpoints, through brand development and tone of voice, design, social media, email marketing and PR activities.
Brand Development
As part of our distinctive brand development process, we undertook research, stakeholder questionnaires and brand workshops to discover the perceived emotional business image of Lancaster BID and used our results to help unlock its potential.
From this, we uncovered why the organisation exists, and developed its brand purpose and values. We then created Lancaster BID’s new, determined, and emboldened tone of voice, and a series of key messages to ensure focus and clarity across all communication.
It was clear that Lancaster BID was the hub of the Lancaster business community, bringing together knowledge, skills and resources to offer guidance, deliver initiatives, and create events and activities that ultimately drive positive change within Lancaster and make the city a success for everyone.
Lancaster BID needed the tools to communicate these organisational messages and convey the successful work that it does within the city. With this in mind, we first designed a set of new branded assets to sit across all owned media channels, and social assets to drive home the key attributes of Lancaster BID.
Informed by the new verbal brand for Lancaster BID, visually we created uniformity for the brand through use of consistent colour and fonts in design. Lancaster BID’s original Love Local, Love Lancaster messaging was also given new life through the formation of a new variation of the lock up, targeting the organisation’s consumer audience.
