Assist with the strategic direction of the school and help to shape its brand identity.
Background
Dyer Street School is located in the middle of the Hutt Valley in Lower Hutt. Children begin their journey at the kindergarten and continue their education through the school from Years 1 to 6. With numerous pohutukawa trees, a large playing field, netball/tennis courts, and two playgrounds, the school is surrounded by wide open spaces as well as a supportive and loyal community.
Dyer Street School’s principal reached out to Synthesis Marketing for some assistance with the school’s marketing efforts.
1. Insight Gathering & Marketing Planning
The purpose of the insight gathering exercise was to gain an understanding of how the community saw the school and identify ways to improve stakeholders connection with the school.
Parent Survey
In March 2021 Synthesis Marketing managed the design and deployment of a stakeholder survey amongst 207 parents of existing or past students. The response rate was extremely high and indicated that many parents were strongly engaged in the school and the role that it played in their child’s education. The feedback itself was extremely helpful, and gave the school a clear picture as to what it was doing well and what could be improved.
Key Marketing Messages
The responses to the parent survey provided great insight into the reasons parents chose to send their children to Dyer Street School. These reasons formed the basis of the key marketing messages that Synthesis crafted for the school. Clear direction was given as to the most relevant ways to communicate with parents and how to foster greater advocacy amongst this group so that parents were more likely to recommend the school to friends, family and colleagues.
Marketing Plan
The parent survey provided a strong platform for the development of a marketing plan for the school. A number of marketing initiatives were identified to deliver against the objectives. These activities included:
- Raising awareness of the school and improving its visibility in the local community.
- Maximising the school’s online presence.
- Encouraging referrals and word of mouth marketing from stakeholders to actively recruit new students.
The newly appointed school’s principal, Lee Ewington, used these findings to inform the school’s new strategic plan, which in turn fed into subsequent marketing activities including looking at brand identity and a logo redesign project.
2. Brand Identity & Logo Redesign
The parent survey identified the school’s existing logo and brand identity had no connection to place or people and lacked a link to the cultural identity of the school.
Synthesis Marketing took a highly collaborative approach to developing the design brief and ran a workshop on-site at the school involving the principal and students. Key information covered during the workshop included:
- Vision, strategy and objectives of the school.
- Target audiences.
- Marketing messages.
- Brand identity and personality.
- Key design elements of the look and feel (icons, colour schemes and fonts).
- Reference logos.
Existing logo
The logo that Dyer Street School was using as part of it’s brand identity was quite generic, with no meaningful connection to the location or history of the school.
It was very important for the principal to get all stakeholders on board, gathering everyone’s feedback, to incorporate a wide net of ideas into the design, incorporating as many concepts as possible.
The principal had a strong vision for the school. A very important driver for the project was to form a strong cultural connection with the community and the school and reflect this through a new identity.
The school’s principal was heavily involved in the entire design brief process, and provided significant leadership and guidance along the way.
The Synthesis team collaborated with the principal to run a workshop with the students and get their ideas on what their school logo should look like. A shortlist was prepared from this and added to the brief, along with logo concepts from other key stakeholders, including teachers and parents.
A number of concepts made the shortlist.
The process followed for the creation of the new logo concepts was engaging and consultative and included the following steps.
1. Creation of concepts
Based on the approved design brief, Synthesis provided a series of brand identity designs, with multiple options within each. This series was based on three different design approaches:
- A refresh of the existing logo – this involved taking the existing logo and refreshing it to show how it could be portrayed in a more up-to-date way without a significant change to brand identity. This included investigating colours, fonts, and subtle changes to other elements.
- A new logo inspired by elements from the current design – we used existing elements of the current logo, such as a shape, colour or concept, as a starting point for the design of a new logo. While the logos in this series looked quite different to the existing design, there was a visual connection in brand identity.
- A complete redesign – we started with a blank piece of paper and created a number of options that took full inspiration from the design brief rather than borrowing from any elements of the existing logo and brand identity.
At this stage, Synthesis workshopped the design concepts with the principal and staff to hone in on the preferred themes, concepts, and colours. The list of options was then further refined.
2. Design refinement and selection
For the shortlisted concepts, further work was done to incorporate feedback gathered. Often, this feedback was about how colours, fonts and design elements from across some of the previously presented concepts would be considered.
In presenting the initial and refined designs, both soft and hard copy visuals were provided to give a sense of how they will look when applied to different settings in which brand identity is used, and to allow decisions to be made on a preferred design.
3. Logo implementation
On final approval of the preferred logo design and brand identity, Synthesis Marketing provided artwork files in a range of formats, along with brand guidelines. A full rebrand plan was developed and was implemented early in 2024. This included:
- Marketing collateral.
- School uniforms.
- Exterior signage.
Old Logo
New Logo
