Why
The Catholic Diocese of Parramatta approached Be You Not Them to realign their suite of early childhood education and care services into a consolidated brand. The idea of Catholic services for all rather than services for Catholics provided great insight into the brand’s future purpose.
How
First, we immersed ourselves in the brand by auditing the current brands and then coming up to speed through a goal post-alignment workshop with dozens of stakeholders, from the CEO to the on-the-ground staff. Then, we audited each service’s purpose, vision, positioning and values to clarify where we wanted to align the future brand. Data collated and analysed from the workshop represented a consensus among participants on how we want to be perceived by both our community and internal team to build a strategic foundation for the brand. We built personas around the community that the future brand would serve and sense-checked the brand’s direction against those.
What
The chosen name Ambrose honours St. Ambrose of Milan: scholar, Doctor of the Church and Patron Saint of Learning and Beekeepers. Whilst steeped in Catholic heritage, the name is not overtly Catholic. It signals our Catholic heritage without discouraging non-Catholics from using our services. Ambrose is a simple, distinctive, memorable and relatively unused name. In keeping with the St. Ambrose brand story, we included the beehive within the master brand in the form of an “A”, a symbol of industry and cooperation and, by implication, a symbol of social obligation, reciprocal love and friendship.
Our insight of “Learning for life” formed the basis for Ambrose’s brand promise and the new master-brand icon, which we consistently reinforced through our range of designed communications. We created a toolkit and Style Guide, and then we developed an internal launch before focusing on external communications across various touchpoints.
- Branding