Already home to Novavax manufacturer, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, world-class automotive manufacturer, Nifco and global chemicals company, Huntsman, Stockton-on-Tees is a borough that is ready and waiting for business. With heaps of potential Stockton-on-Tees council needed a brave and bold investment brand creating to help communicate this is the perfect place to invest and grow. We went head-to-head to win a pitch to deliver the work for them, devising a brand strategy first, before moving onto finessing the designs that won the pitch.
The council are bold and ambitious in their mission to position Stockton-on-Tees as the No.1 choice for medium and large enterprises in the UK to establish and grow - they want it to be the obvious and only choice. To see the growth they want, the brand needed to sell the vision, clearly painting a picture of what it would be like to do business here. It needed to be visionary and help entrepreneurs ‘see’ how locating here could work for them. It needed to demonstrate, prove and show the borough is ready for action, not just tell.
We created a brave brand with playful layouts that experiment with photography, texture and shape. The brand showcases real people from real businesses, providing potential investors with the 'proof' they need to believe this is the place for them too. Our research told us that no other local investment brand was using our colour palette of fiery orange and no-nonsense navy too, which helped us create an identity that stood out from the competition. The intention with all brands should be to stand out, never blend in.
We were equally playful with the copywriting, choosing various phrases such as 'on course', 'on your radar' and 'on form' then adding them to the 'Stockton-on-Tees' name to create punchy titles for adverts, posters and LinkedIn content. We also wrote the copy for the microsite, keeping it light, plucky and to the point.
We worked in collaboration with Ryze, a digital agency specialising in immersive online experiences, to create a microsite that takes you on a journey through the borough, exploring all it has offer. The result is a wonderfully interactive site that has the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality. You can explore it for yourself here.
We also produced comprehensive brand guidelines to make sure that anyone working on the brand could maintain consistency and quality within everything they did as well as contributed heavily towards crafting a name for the brand.