yeah, so just want to start by just obviously just outlining the project.
And just Yeah.
Already like briefly told me, but yeah, so we obviously run marketing agency based in the Scottish Borders in the town of Alice shields. And one of our clients is an in Development Trust called energise Galashiels. So we knew of various different projects that were that were being led by other organisations and we were asked quite frequently to take part in focus groups or market research by these other organisations. So before we even got involved in the brand, please branding project, there was an agency from Birmingham, who had been commissioned by Scottish Borders council to look at branding for the town of Galashiels. So the catalyst for that project was a multimillion pound investment into a new visitor centre in the town. So I don't know if you're aware of this project. It's the largest community art project in the world, and it's called the great tapestry of Scotland. And essentially, it's, you know, hundreds and hundreds of stitched panels, the tale the story of the evolution of Scotland, and, and a lot of tones for to have the tapestry on display in their town, and gala shield. One. It was going to go two to three miles away from here and a hamlet called tweedbank because there's been a new railway like new as in 2009, I think. And this last station is tweedbank And I think the government and the council thought, well, we'll pop it into the bank because people will just come down on the train and that, you know, they'll get off the train and go to the tapestry centre, but there's nothing else then tweedbank at all. Energise Galashiels really championed to have the package to st are located in the town because it's the second last stop on the train line. And Dallas shields like many, many towns and cities up and down the line has really, really suffered from the change in consumer habits and the high streets decimated basically. So the organisation that did the business plan for the tapestry centre, estimated that a fruitful and extra footfall of 150,000 people would come to the capital was there every year. But they massively stressed that the wider offering of Galashiels would have to be significantly improved, to make that happen, because the tap has to stay in or, you know, no one was going to be teleported from wherever enter tablished it and then out again, the whole point of it was economic and social regeneration. So this company in Birmingham had been brought on board by Scottish Borders council to kind of look at that and to kind of give a little bit of branding infrastructure around that. So we took part in a focus group where we were asked for our thoughts and feelings were about the town, depending on who we were where we do call where we are business owner, you know, where we are somebody else from the borders or be somebody from outside the borders. And I think what really came to the fore was to be awareness and the sort of thing. Really, really bad, and if any work was going to be done to achieve 50,000 footfall in brand or creation of a police brand was going to have to be part of that. So luckily for us council decided to give that project over to energise because it will have gone to the Birmingham design agency. But what I had said to anyone that would listen was they had come up with some ideas and concepts, but they were just so far removed because how can somebody environment really who's sitting in a, you know, on a Mac environment or really understand a tone. And this is kind of one of the points about place, branding that I think people don't always understand like, if you're branding a product or a service, you have an organisation who owns that product or service and you can identify the values and you can you can ascertain the features and benefits that the customer is going to get and there's a lot of control within the owning organisation. When you're branding, a tone, none of that exists. Because a tone is is lots of component parts, including the people and all the different nuances with the people in you know the physical infrastructure, there's an historic social context, you know, there are so many variables that you can't just look online and get a sense of or, you know, go and have a look at someone's mission statement or something like that, to get a sense of what the brand needs to be. And I felt really strongly, I didn't see that I thought we should do it. But I just did some different Scottish Borders at the minimum, but ideally, somebody from Galashiels should be developing this brand. Because there's so much that you will need to know that you to make it work. The Scottish Borders claims will be for over energise on several marketing companies pitched for the job, and we were successful. So I thought, Oh, my goodness, I've got myself into now have an art because I've been, you know, on my soapbox, talk about all of the importance of place brand, and you know, using Amsterdam and New York as examples of good practice. Yeah, that's just us.
So we won the contract. And I was like, right, I'm gonna have to do a really, really good job on this. So what I did was, before we even thought about design, I was like, wait, I need to pull this right back and think about who am I going to get to work on the project. So the first thing that I did was, because part of the scoping that we did, I said, we would not just give the Telenor brand, but we would give a toolkit. And the toolkit is essentially a community asset that will enable any business, any organisation any charity, any skill, any individual to use land, because it has to be seen as a community asset. You need your community to be ambassadors and advocates of this brand, or you're not going to get the traction. So I knew that it had to be more than a logo. So there was photography, videography, copywriting, and actually music, included, in addition to your normal graphic design assets for the brand, because I wanted, no matter what channel they were on, I wanted everything to be really bad to establish your brand. So I looked around for people who could produce all of those assets from but they were either Galashiels people are the lift and gala shields now, because I want every everybody who was involved in it passionately cared about the tone. And I totally get it. That's not always possible. But for me, it was really important. And we made that happen. So the first thing that we did was we started doing PR PR about your project, because it was all about getting the tone excited about the fact that it was going to have a brand. And we had a view. Are you aware of the film The Usual Suspects? No. Okay, you're far too young. That's really good. It's really it's really like iconic film. And there's a full always like the lineup of the usual suspects. So we did this whole the usual suspects or unusual suspects. I think we did. And all of the creatives, we were all lined up against this wall. And we were like, Yeah, we're then usual suspects that are going to be rebranding gala shields, and we you know, we got a lot of really good traction. And straight away what it meant was, we could mitigate as much as possible any negativity around the brand, because what we were seeing right from the start was this brand has been created for Galashiels by people who cared about Galashiels. You know, it's not If it'd been a Birmingham firm, the first thing that people would have said was, Oh, my goodness, you're investing in the town but you're sending money away, don't Birmingham to you know, probably a massively expensive design agency. People who don't even know where Galashiels is on the map, I mean, that that would have been a negative but we sort of saw reportedly mitigated that. So we work we were working on that and then the next thing I did was and this is really important, hilt together a stakeholder group of key people in the town and what essential is essential without was I had the formal influence are so your counsellors your you know, the skills the business people? That was always people aren't like, that just seem to have a really strong voice in the time so for me, there's just one old human called Beatty Scott, right? She's like 86 or something, but she she rules the roost in the tone.
Yeah, absolutely. An affair. He doesn't like something. That's it. It's pretty much dead in the water, you know? So there's a few people like that that are real influencers, but informal influencers. Yeah, well, I invite them To be part of the process, from beginning to end. And the reason I did that was it again, it's about mitigation and ensuring the success of the launch. If they were part of the process, it'd be very difficult for them to not be positive about it at launch, even if even if their views were the view that we went with. So for example, the first question that we asked them was, should we call it Gala? Which is the colloquialism for it? Or should we call it gala shields, which is probably what it's called. So Betty said gala shield, a gala. But everybody else on the stakeholder group said gala shield. But what that meant was I was able to go back to Betty and with full transparency and fee, or you know, get why you wanted it to be called Gala. But actually, you can see everyone else is kind of seeing Gail, she was so she knows we're going to be able to go on her social media Facebook page, which is got an unbelievable reach and go well, it should be Gala, she'd be on brand for Gala, because she's been part of that process. And I literally every single stage of the design and everything, gave them early insight, you know, they were in a really amped up in the cold. And you know, as you're part of this very select group of influential people in Dallas shields, here's a preview. What do you think before we take it, you know, take it to the wider audience. And that was like I've kind of stakeholder management sub project all the way through. So then, once we decided that it was going to be called Dallas shields, we had to come up with a strap line. And again, we engaged massively with lots of people. What do you think, you know, what do we want Galashiels to represent? Where we'll falling down at the moment? So the focus group fed back that the town was called grey, unwelcoming, hard, dirty, nothing positive at all, if it was meant to be, if it was a human being, who would it be? And people said, Jeremy Clarkson, you know, argon standoffish. I mean, nothing at all. But what we want it was warm, welcoming, energetic, engaging. He was somewhere that's only, but not and you don't have it doesn't have to be your home. You know, I mean, so those were the kind of words that we were that that was the kind of information that we gave to lots of different people. And so we had four or five different strap lines. So it was Galashiels gateway to the borders, Galashiels heartland of the borders, things like that. So it was always the town and then the strap line. And then we created with three graphic designers, because again, I wanted to make sure that it was really thorough, and different designers have different approaches.
But we gave each designer the strap lines, and say to them create designs based on those strap line.And Cat was obviously one of those designers. And so we've got them all back in. And there were some amazing marking every single one of them we worked on, it's as a piece of graphic design work, again, because it's pleased and it's that little bit more challenging. We market tested each of the brand. So what I did was I basically went on a roadshow around the town, I was in the library, I was at the university campus, I was in town, and I had a matrix or different demographics. So I made sure that every single demographic was touched, you know, whether it be race, age, socio economics, and everything. So that we could really ensure that it was very inclusive. So I did these road shows. So I set up a little table for each of the options. And what was really important with that was I invested a bit of money in I created boards, but I also had like promo items because I wanted people to touch you know, I wanted it to be as sensitive as possible. And expedience. So we had mugs, T shirts, boards, we should have a look on social with shorter falls within music. And basically I got everybody to read each one and just, you know, from one, one to eight or nine, I can't remember how many it was in order. And for the one that they liked, and the one that they disliked the most. I asked why. And then I just had this big matrix and I was just gonna note on all of this, though, and then over the course of the one or two weeks that we had that work out. There was a clear winner.And it was actually cats design, which was fantastic for QA. You know, it was it was great for cats confidence. I think that people like charges. And because the real there were some fairly high hairs within the other couple of graphic designers, you know.
And then yeah, we just we just communicate bad. But then. So then we we launched the brand. But as part of the launch of the brand, we fed back on the process of how we had, you know, decided on the brand. So it was really, really clear that it was the community's choice. And it wasn't ours as in our marketing agency, and it wasn't energises as the client. It was actually the community that chose the brand. And then like to see the launched.The unfortunate thing for us, then was COVID hit. Yeah. Because of the application of the brand. I mean, it's fine. We've done some recent research and everybody's aware of the brand. They don't necessarily know that that is the tone brand. But we need we really needed hard and fast engagement at the point of launch for us really taken to gain traction with it. But we everything was just locked completely, you know. And so now in the risk budget, then for all of that, and because it's public sector, it's it's gone. No, the moment is gone. So everything that we had planned to do, we know can't because because there's no budget. So it's alright, it's on track, but it's maybe not where I would want it to be a COVID hadn't hit.
But it's being used. And it's a we, you know, people aren't aware of it. And what I have said to everybody is that this is not a short term project. And it's actually it's always going to be evolving as well, you know, it's because this place continually evolves, the brand has to continually evolve as well. And so it's work that we're just going to keep going. So that's pretty much it in a nutshell.
That sounds really interesting how So how long did the project don't you said it was a long term project. But still, yeah,
it's still ongoing in that the work that we're looking at now is about awareness and profile building and adoption and usage, the project to actually develop the brand, I think we'd have been, I think it was 16 weeks, maybe 20 weeks.
Okay, that's quite a long time, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. But because in the year, the design element of that would have been a fraction. But it was because of that whole engagement.Pre during and post that we had to get right, that it was so long. And actually the photography videography took a while because we wanted to try and get the tone in different seasons and things are in different loops. So that was actually meant to take we were meant to be for over a year. But again, because COVID Hit we couldn't even do that. So
yeah, that sounds so interesting. I don't know if you've heard like any about my project. But I'm basically just for my for the masters that me and Cat are on. I'm looking at how I can basically involve like local artists to create a cultural identity for the city. Because Southampton currently involved in the city of culture bid for 2025. So I'm looking at like, if we were to win the bid, how can we kind of bring together the artists and make something that'd be really interesting. But I hadn't thought about a lot of the stuff that you've spoken about. So yeah, I think there's a lot of things that I need to think about.
But was there anything looking back that you would have done differently on thehouse or his house like it's pre project? I'm gonna say no, because I think we were really thorough with it
And I apologise because obviously this is UK. creatives are a very challenging group of China. Ah, but they really are because I think melancholy and mourning and you being an i in angst with everything in life seems to be how creativity comes. So there's always Oh, you know, you And I think that if you're already asking them to get involved for free
Yeah. So far I've had like, I think I've had like three or four people, which is more than I was expecting to get.
Really? Absolutely you don't have a winner? Yeah. So I mean it's about the pitch isn't it? Like for me if I was framing that conversation if you're better successful, the profile and I mean it's global exposure to an artist who's involved isn't it? So it's, it's it's a pretty zero risk game for them. So you've got quite a good sale really you know, it's not about what you might get now for your for your art but where it could take you if you're careful. Yeah. hugely exciting thought yeah, really,
really interesting. But yeah, it's really nice to hear a case study that is like obviously like cat nose and through connections because
if there's anything at all you know that you want to run past or you're worth thinking about and you just want our you know, because ultimately you know it market and drive so much doesn't it like even this bit This is about stealing this 30 and then marketing the city or something. So if it helps to have like a non creative but very objective marketing view on something and you know, I'm happy to look over any documents happy to jump on a call again, no problem. Yeah, just
anything today because wasn't really that no, definitely. Yeah.
And I know I need to get this same PDF back over to you. Tell us Do you know why else do it whilst it's on my mind? Ya know, just if there's anything that I can do to help let me know and if I don't, I don't get any other
questions. But if I do think of anything, like looking back at the recording, I definitely like to shoot you an email.
