Croydon BID Brand Overview
The brief
Croydon is going through major structural change due to recent construction developments and investments which are impacting local businesses and Croydon BID levy payers. For over ten years we have been working with the BID on numerous projects, related to helping them improve how Croydon town is perceived by visitors, local residents and communicating more clearly to its levy payers what it does, the services it provides and the value that this has.
The creative idea
The BID has five core lines of business activity which make up their pledges. These cover; safety, cleaner streets, festivals and events, helping visitors in and around the city and helping local businesses, all of which have a positive impact on the local community. We decided that each of these pledges should be attributed their own colour in order to help clearly identify the impact of these activities through all the BID’s corporate communications, including their new website which we designed, BID Renewal documents and other business-led campaigns.
Disciplines
Brand Identity
Campaign Identity
Editorial
Animation
Exhibition Design
Community
Upgrading Croydon BID’s online presence, we designed an all singing and dancing new website, with a primarily consumer focus. Promoting retail, up and coming events and local businesses, the website is a one-stop-shop for all things Croydon. The website also communicates in-depth information about Croydon BID itself, including core services, achievements and benefits to the local community.
With engaging messaging and signposting throughout the website, we created a dynamic set of pages directing visitors to a broad range of topics, covering local guides, events and a business directory. The flexibility of our page templates gives our client the ability to extensively change their content making the website adaptable to future campaigns and promotions.
Croydon is London Borough of Culture for 2023 and this year-long celebration will showcase the very best of Croydon. We were honoured to spearhead the campaign branding for ‘Croydon Stands Tall’ – an inspiring public art initiative that seeks to infuse the borough of Croydon with boundless creativity, artistic expression, and active community involvement. We sponsored a giraffe for this remarkable charity fundraising campaign, a collaboration between public art events producer Wild in Art and Croydon BID, which is dedicated to supporting Crisis, a charity that helps people experiencing homelessness and is active in Croydon through its Crisis Skylight Centre.
This primary colour palette, when combined with bold typography, creates a strong, distinctive look and feel, always highlighting the business benefits that the BID provides through the use of core singular statements backed up by facts and figures.
As a result of COVID-19 the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors have been left hanging by a thread. National lockdowns have brought many businesses to their knees, and falling back into tiered systems could prove to be the final nail in their coffins.
As a successor to the #RaiseTheBar campaign, we helped Matthew Sims, CEO of Croydon BID and Katie Blake of Kallaway launch BounceBackBetter – a campaign comprising of 4 ‘asks’ which are vital to the survival and recovery of businesses, towns and cities across England.
The brief was to create a simple and effective awareness raising social media campaign for the opening of Croydon hospitality that the BID could then distribute across their media channels, but that venues themselves could also post on their own channels.
Croydon BID also asked us to further evolve the campaign for the new al fresco [‘areas that will be opening up first on the High Street – applying our designs to wayfinding,outdoor seating barriers, and eventually applying them to the lampost hanging banners.
The BID recognised that there was a need to provide some much needed cover to the growing number of empty shop units popping up around Croydon, mainly due to city centre restructuring.
We created a ‘CR’ (Croydon) people campaign that shone a spotlight on the diverse people of Croydon, especially those who have made a significant and positive contribution to the ‘CR’ community and society as a whole. Whether through the leadership they have shown, the positive influence they have had or the example they have set through their actions.
“This campaign has a great potential to motivate those living, working and visiting the centre of Croydon, while also acting as a useful tool to help people make their way from place to place.
Councillor Paul Scott, Cabinet Lead for Planning and Regeneration, Croydon Council
‘CR’ covers all the postcodes of Croydon, the campaign reflected the diversity and personality of the people of Croydon both culturally, physically and individually.
