Livv Housing Group
Brand strategy, development, roll-out and training
Merseyside-based registered housing provider First Ark Group appointed us to create a completely new corporate brand to reflect their reputation, culture and ambition. With new leadership in place, the 14,000-home organisation wanted an energetic, fresh and modern identity to reflect its core business and plans for growth.
We were asked to test current brand perceptions, engage key audiences and develop the new identity, then help the Group to launch and roll it out for the business year 2020/21. We started with in-depth interviews of key external stakeholders, followed by a series of workshops and online surveys with the board, leadership team and staff to understand the vision, strategy, competition and customer profile.
This work inspired the name Livv – to focus on the client’s core purpose of making people’s lives better, and its modern approach to delivering great services and support to communities. As an eye-catching prefix, the name offered lots of positive, active ways to promote the client’s work (for example, Livv well, Livv your way, Livv safely).
We matched the friendly, personal name with a bright, colourful visual identity based on the Group’s mission and values. The versatile graphic language, colour palette and logo use strong flashes and dots of colour to represent the diversity and confidence of Livv’s activity.
To accompany the brand launch, we designed a suite of core physical and digital materials including a completely new website, intranet, tenancy agreements, sales brochures, leaflets, stationery, signage, vehicle livery, newsletters and magazines.
The final stages of this project coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which meant that launch plans needed to be quickly adjusted to work in a more virtual way. This involved extra work on social media, an animated video to familiarise staff with the new brand and direct mail to unveil it to customers and explain what the change meant for them.
With the new brand in place, we wrote and designed Livv’s corporate plan and first annual report. We also helped the organisation to embed its desired ‘caring, confident, clear’ tone of voice through online training for staff, a writing style guide and plain language editing of key documents.