Image showing thr brand work for WWT

Unifying the brand experience

Building a seamless brand experience for visitors - from online to onsite

WWT is the wetland charity. They have a clear mission to restore them and unlock their amazing powers for the 10 million visitors they have each year, inspiring them to connect with nature and take action to help protect it.

Following a new brand launch in 2023, WWT wanted our visitor experience expertise to bring this new brand identity to life across their ten UK sites.

Services Delivered

  • Design
  • Guidelines

Laura Smithson, Head of Visitor Experience Delivery, WWT

It’s been a delight working with you all on the WWT brand project. You have been so easy to work with, and your clear communications and collaborative working style have made the project run smoothly. Your creative energy has helped to bring WWT’s brand to life at our sites, and your gentle challenge has helped us to think through our brand principles and how we apply them.

With a new brand, including tone of voice and messaging, WWT had successfully updated a range of digital and print communications. However, their physical sites didn’t feature the new brand, so the team approached us to create a high-level design concept that could then be applied to all ten of their sites.

We started the project with a kick off session with the core team. This was so we could understand the current brand guidelines along with details about the key sites and each of their unique challenges.

Following our workshop session with the team, we developed a three stage approach to the project to provide clear stages for wider review and engagement across the organisation.

With a clear process and agreed set of deliverables, we then built our understanding of the sites through nationwide visits. This not only let us get a feel for the spaces themselves, but enabled us to audit and evaluate the visitor experience at each so we could understand where to unite the experience, but also where to let the uniqueness of each site shine through.

Following the site visits, we presented our findings and recommendations, along with a high level design scheme, to the team in a workshop. The thinking went much deeper, however, as our recommendations broke down each set of signs across the site, organising them into different functions and showing where the brand could be applied for the most impact.

At this stage, we also mapped out the visitor journey, organising it into three simple stages: ‘welcome’, ‘explore’ and ‘what’s next?’. Using this structure, we could define how both key messaging and visual identity elements could be used across the visitor experience. In particular, we focused on the two key moments in the journey – arrival (the all important first impression) and departure (the lasting impression).

We used London Wetland Centre as our pilot site, creating a detailed plan along with implementation designs for the arrival and departure spaces. This enabled us to ensure the proposed approach was working before we applied it to other sites.

As well as physical signage amends, we also ensured WWT were able to clearly tell their story and communicate their key messages at opportune moments in the customer journey through engaging messaging. We used their core brand guidelines and messages to inform a series of onsite messages that could be used in key spaces, such as entry and exit.

Since the pilot at London Wetland Centre, we’ve completed further work at MartinMere, Slimbridge and Arundel. With more to follow!