Branding & Identity

In an increasingly competitive environment, with many alternative places to visit, shop, work and locate a business, brand and identity is critical. It is likely to provoke the first response one has to a location; before any reflection is made upon more tangible components, its range of shops and services, quality of visitor experience or transport provision.

Develop Your Place Identity

Place branding can turn a ‘your place’ into a destination. It creates a single identity for a location and extends it to all its offerings and interactions. From a customer point of view this creates a unique picture of the location at every level of interaction.

A place brand is its promise of value, a promise that needs to be kept. Good branding can assist in making places more desirable, just as poor branding can assist in making towns and cities undesirable. Successful town and city brands communicate their history, quality of place, lifestyle, culture, diversity, and proactively form public /private partnerships (town teams) in order to enhance their vitality and overall attractiveness.

A strong identity can help build and maintain loyalty to 'your place'.

GJR provides both strong design input together with an in depth understanding of the essential ingredients to stimulating a successful visit. Our typical work programme would incorporate:

  • Researching the location
  • Differentiating its unique selling points
  • Teasing out the desired positioning
  • Providing a design solution
  • Communicating the brand

Allocating time and energy to the identity and brand of your centre will provide brand loyalty and over time higher levels of awareness and general visitation. This is in addition to a more attractive place to work or location to set up business.

GJR is an integrated business which can research, understand the commercial realities and design and implement place identities. We look forward to hearing of your own challenges.

Understand Your Positioning

Positioning is a perceptual location. It’s where ‘your place’, your town or city fits into the marketplace. Effective positioning puts you first in line in the minds of potential customers.

Positioning is a powerful tool that allows you to create an image. And image is the outward representation of being who you want to be, doing what you want to do, and having what you want to have. Positioning your town can lead to greater opportunity. Being positioned by your customers of competitors restricts your choices and provides limitations.

If you don’t define your town or city a competitor will do it for you. Your position in the market will evolve from the defining characteristics of 'your place'.

Positioning is your Competitive Strategy

Is 'your place' an 'up market' destination, somewhere in the middle or price sensitive, have you a quality environment, can you offer the added value of customer service? How accessible are you, is transportation an issue. How do you market ‘your place’ GJR and its specialist team will help clarify the following and use it to position your town or city:

  • What the one thing 'your place' does best
  • What is unique about 'your place'
  • What is your strongest strength

Positioning, when used effectively, will help you be first place in the mind of potential visitors.

GJR can help you understand your positioning and translate the findings into a coherent brand and identity strategy which can be communicated to your customer.

Provide A Design Solution

Branding design goes beyond the surface graphics. A corporate brand identity is the whole personality of a product, company or organisation. Everything from the name, the identity, the colors and the tone of voice all form part of a brand identity development.

How a brand behaves, its employees and its mythology are all assets with commercial value.

Logo and branding design work may be required due to corporate or commercial change. Organisations evolve. It’s natural that your existing logo and branding design may no longer communicate 'your place' or your town’s positioning.

Our Passionate For Design

People connect with brands with head and heart and the most memorable brands usually combine a strong appeal to both. Effective brand identity design will usually create well differentiated identities for 'your place'.

  • We work from an outline brief which is shared with internal and external stakeholder groups
  • We provide creative concepts that will connect your with your customers and stakeholders.
  • We develop a unique and distinctive creative solution that keeps your brand differentiated and ahead of your competitors.
  • We produce brand guidelines to ensure consistency across all elements of online and offline brand communications

Communicate Your Brand

If you simply tell the world about how great your town or city is, it is ordinary publicity at best, and spin at worst. In place branding, the role of communications is not primarily a method for telling the world about a place, but a method for making the world aware of the actions a place performs which best exemplify what kind of place it is.

Every place must compete with every other place for its share of spend, talent, and attention. Just like a famous company, a town or city will find it much easier to sell itself, recruit the best people, attract visitors, leverage investment, stage events, and exert influence.

A place’s reputation needs to be built on qualities, which are positive, attractive, unique, sustainable and relevant to many different people. A place’s brand needs to be supported, reinforced and enriched by every act of communication between that place and its chosen audience.

GJR will review:

  • The way a place promotes itself for business, tourism, investment and recruitment
  • The way a place promotes, represents and shares its culture
  • The way a place manages and develops its built and natural environment
  • The way a place residents behave and how they treat visitors
  • The way a place features in the media
  • The other places it associates with

Unless every town centre partner consistently communicates and demonstrates the same carefully developed brand, people in other places will quickly become confused about what the place brand stands for. The role of brand champions, repeatedly communicating brand values, clarity, consistency and constancy are all critical elements of successful band communication.

GJR will help ensure that ‘your place’ gets due credit for its real strengths and appropriate equity from the recognition achieved.