Living Streets

Rebranding and re-energising a B2B charity to broaden appeal

  • Rebrand
  • Brand Strategy
  • Brand Identity
  • Design
  • Copy Writing
  • Tone of Voice
  • Illustration
  • Campaign idea

For small char­i­ties, focus is the key to gain­ing aware­ness and this 90-year-old brand had lost its way. Liv­ing Streets – the ven­er­a­ble char­i­ty behind the intro­duc­tion of the zebra cross­ing – want­ed to broad­en its appeal beyond B2B to effec­tive­ly fundraise and grow. The organ­i­sa­tion was frag­ment­ed and lacked focus, both inter­nal­ly and externally.

Build­ing on its her­itage as The Pedes­tri­an Soci­ety, we cre­at­ed a new invig­o­rat­ing pur­pose and mes­sag­ing strat­e­gy; repo­si­tion­ing ​‘every­day walk­ing’ into an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly trans­for­ma­tive act for indi­vid­u­als and soci­ety. This has had a gal­vanis­ing effect on Liv­ing Streets, help­ing the char­i­ty to grow in size and rel­e­vance by attract­ing a broad­er base of sup­port­ers, while win­ning a few firsts and awards along the way.

From the very first meet­ing we knew that ODA under­stood who we are, what we do and the dif­fi­cul­ties we faced. Whilst the visu­al iden­ti­ty is icon­ic and engag­ing, for us it was about get­ting the vision and mes­sag­ing right first. Using our research and our teams they got right under the skin of our unusu­al char­i­ty and cre­at­ed the uni­fied voice we needed.

Annabel Davies Marketing Director, Living Streets

PUTTING WALK­ING FRONT AND CEN­TRE WITH A NEW SHARED BRAND PUR­POSE AND NARRATIVE

We embed­ded and acti­vat­ed the pur­pose – Let’s cre­at­ing a walk­ing nation’ – which serves as a ral­ly­ing cry to gain par­tic­i­pa­tion, and a man­i­festo for change. The strat­e­gy joined up all aspects of the organ­i­sa­tion from cam­paign­ing and influ­enc­ing, ser­vices through to behav­iour change products.

FROM STA­T­IC LOGO TO DYNAM­IC BRAND IDENTITY

For 90 years Liv­ing Streets has been a bea­con for walk­ing. Their most famous cam­paign led to the UK’s first zebra cross­ing to help peo­ple walk cities safely.

The iden­ti­ty sys­tem had to cap­ture a sense of ener­gy and momen­tum. The result is an iden­ti­ty that lever­ages the icon­ic Liv­ing Street sto­ry into a set of three dynam­ic logos. The com­mu­ni­ty of walk­ers on the iden­ti­ty rep­re­sent­ed all audiences.

SIM­PLE, BOLD DESIGN SYSTEM

Our sim­ple design sys­tem uses a bright colour palette, black and white bars, bold typog­ra­phy, and our illus­trat­ed peo­ple. The brand is instant­ly recog­nis­able and can be deployed in var­i­ous ways to cre­ate sim­ple visu­al cohe­sion whilst allow­ing for flex­i­bil­i­ty across all the organisation’s tar­get audiences.

FLEX­I­BLE IDEN­TI­TY ACROSS MUL­TI­PLE CHAN­NELS AND AUDIENCES

We cre­at­ed a mul­ti-chan­nel brand iden­ti­ty across print, exhi­bi­tion, sig­nage and var­i­ous dig­i­tal chan­nels. The iden­ti­ty sys­tem flex­es across mul­ti­ple tar­get audi­ences from gov­ern­ment and stake­hold­ers to cor­po­rate part­ners and work­places, through to schools and fam­i­lies with­out los­ing cohesion.

Won

Cam­paign of the Year 2019, Char­i­ty times Awards

Charity times Awards

First

Appeared on aware­ness sur­vey for the first time

CAM Lite charity

INSPIR­ING, ACCES­SI­BLE MES­SAG­ING, TONE AND COPY

The brand had been very copy-heavy and focused on mak­ing lengthy sci­en­tist argu­ments in sup­port of walk­ing that didn’t engage the broad­er audi­ence. We put the brand on the front foot with a new dis­tinct tone of voice. Our aim: to sound ​’pos­i­tive­ly un-pedes­tri­an’ and make a pow­er­ful case for walk­ing via sim­ple irrefutable ben­e­fits, deliv­ered with dynam­ic copy.

A CLEAR AND FLEX­I­BLE BRAND ARCHI­TEC­TURE FOR GROWTH

As audi­ences and pro­gram ini­tia­tives grew, Liv­ing Streets need­ed a sim­ple sys­tem to ensure mas­ter brand vis­i­bil­i­ty. The aim was to dri­ve aware­ness whilst ensur­ing clar­i­ty of prod­uct and pro­gram. To achieve this, the new archi­tec­ture lever­ages assets and ser­vices tar­get­ed at key audi­ences to dri­ve new rev­enue streams.

We cre­at­ed a sub-brand clear­ly tar­get­ing schools and fam­i­lies with spe­cif­ic mes­sag­ing. Pro­grams and prod­ucts were named and designed with­in this sub-brand with clear roles and pur­pos­es. We also re-posi­tioned the sub-brand (WOW pro­gram) from a B2B behav­iour change pro­gram to one big year­long walk­ing chal­lenge, involv­ing par­ents. High­ly suc­cess­ful, WOW was a crit­i­cal com­po­nent in dri­ving engage­ment and involve­ment across all com­mu­ni­ties and audiences.

We re-posi­tioned the sub-brand (WOW pro­gram) from a B2B behav­iour change pro­gram to one big year long walk­ing chal­lenge involv­ing par­ents and dri­ving engage­ment and involve­ment across all com­mu­ni­ties and audiences 

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