‘Quando a Roma’ — City as a Brand: Promoting the Cultural Heritage of Rome
Summary -
With the world of marketing and advertisement constantly changing and evolving, it is now so important and crucial for cities, as well as companies, to brand and market themselves properly and appropriately to keep pace with this continuous change. As consumers, we are goaded by hundreds of brands on a daily basis. Therefore, sometimes we quite naturally make a judgement call on some of these brands simply by how impressed we are with their visual branding. This is, therefore, why the visual aspect of a city in this case is now so important. Over the course of the project, I will ultimately look to take all of this into account as I look to brand Rome, with the concept being of branding the ancient and historic city of ancient Rome in a very modern way with the concept of emotional branding being at the heart of this.
Aim -
The aim of the project is to apply the concept of emotional branding into city branding to brand some of the standout features of ancient Rome. Common things we associate with is the history of the city, visible through its culture, architecture, art, and society in general. These are all features that will be considered as I look to design a logo for the city that include design variations, additional graphic collateral to support the campaign, a website, and most importantly, a two-and- a-half to three-minute motion graphics video that will help the audience to engage with Rome, and the campaign in general.
The Brief -
As with any other project, there were a set list of objectives I wanted to meet and achieve, and deliverables I needed to produce. These were agreed with my then project Supervisor and can be seen below:
Key Deliverables -
- Conduct secondary research into the history of the city, before carrying out several case studies into existing city branding campaigns.
- Conduct primary research for all artefacts — helped gain an understanding of what type of content and features my target audience think should be included in the motion graphics video, and other artefacts.
- Design the logo, variations to go with it, and additional graphic collateral. One of the aims of the logo is to also provide variations on the design of the one I decide to use. Allows it to be used across multiple platforms whenever needed to appeal to different markets.
- Design the website for the campaign, and upload the relevant screenshots to an InVision document — another major part of the campaign.
- Plan, design, and create the motion graphics video.
- State the next steps and what I would do if I were to take the project further.
Results -
The subsequent campaign has allowed users and viewers to:
- Engage with the city and appreciate the breadth of research that was undertaken to deliver the various artefacts, one of the main deliverables.
- Understand how the campaign was able to combine the concepts and methodologies; Emotional Branding and City Branding to Rome and appreciate why I used these to promote the city.
- Identify with a series of characters and learn more about them and their individual stories. This particular point was very relevant for the Gladiators as throughout the research phase I learned a lot more about how Gladiators were actually seen in ancient Rome and how their lives were perceived. This was then something I communicated very clearly throughout the video to further educate the audience.
- Interact with the various logos and subsequent motion graphics video and website to gain a better understanding of the brand.
- Use the video to further achieve this, as well as entertain themselves and continue to expand their knowledge of the city.
- And for me personally, the project allowed me to not only continue to develop my research skills (especially in terms of branding), but also further my creative skills by creating several logos and artefacts from scratch, as well as further my skills in planning and creating motion graphic videos.
Deliverables -
Motion Graphic Video -
Please see Augustus below, who will direct you to the Motion Graphics Video.
Final High-Fidelity Mockup Walk Through -
Please see below for the final High-Fidelity Mockup Walk Through.
Final thoughts and reflections, and next steps -
Overall, I am very happy with how the project went. Thanks to the hard work I put into it, I was able to create an engaging campaign using a lot of different design artefacts and graphics all with different angles and stories behind them, therefore using the adaptive branding framework very well (especially with the logos). The in-depth research (both primary and secondary) allowed me to gather a wide-ranging plethora of information detailing different aspects and parts of the Roman Empire I was then able to transfer into the campaigns visual aspects. I was able to create a campaign with several artefacts and hotspots. A website was planned and designed, and as mentioned above, a series of varying logos were created to address different aspects of the Empire and what my target market thought should be included (again a hit point for the adaptive branding plan), and obviously, the motion graphics video was planned, designed, and then implemented.
However, like with all projects, there is always room for improvement, such as introducing interactive features to the video. This would increase engagement levels and allows the user to skip or rewind to certain parts of the video, as well as making it something a museum would find a lot more useful to invest money in. To increase the videos interactivity, a key interactive feature could be added. This includes interactive buttons in the form of normal regular buttons and characters, as well as arrows directing the user around the different parts of the video. The buttons could offer the opportunity to choose which part of the video the user would rather see from the loading page (like is the case in computer games) and throughout, whereas the characters could pop-up at certain points of the video offering the opportunity to find out more about certain things (like Emperors or monuments). The arrows would obviously allow people to skip to certain bits and rewind to a certain section, making the video more interactive and arguably more engaging, which in turn opens a door to other design features and add-ons.
A big bonus of doing this is that it is then more than imaginable that the video artefact could be used as a hotspot in several museums for educational purposes and is something visitors could use to get a quick glimpse of what awaits them in terms of information and artefacts within that museum. Possible examples of this could be the monuments I mention and draw attention to in the video. Knowing the Adobe Creative Suite has the software and capabilities to implement these changes, this is certainly a feature I would look to implement in the future.
As PM, time management and organisation is always something one can improve on. By managing my time a little better around the design stage I could have designed more graphics to be used across the campaign and could have produced slightly better quality graphics, such as the ones mentioned above. I cannot deny that if I had managed my time on the project slightly better around the research stage, I could make given more time to actually implementing these features.
If given more time to plan the user personas and journeys, as well as a thorough diagram displaying red routes, I would have liked to sit down and actually code the website for the campaign from scratch. This would make it actually accessible instead of just being a series of screenshots on InVision that only provide an indication of how it would look and feel. Therefore, if given more time, coding the campaigns website from scratch to completion is certainly something I would do.
The full version of this Case Study can be found on my portfolio.
