As a research centre and education charity, generating and supporting original, open, and creative thinking on British art, Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) had a strong business plan – with a clear vision, mission – and strategic priorities, pillars, goals & objectives all lined up.
While comfortably able to communicate their beliefs and intentions to guide their internal planning, they were struggling to translate this into clear external messaging.
PMC wanted people not only to use their services – but to form an emotional connection. They needed to tell a story that would help people understand not just how they could transact with them in any given moment – but how PMC is of value and matters in the world.
We know not everything we communicate internally makes for a useful or effective external message. So we worked with the leadership team to dissect and translate this into helpful external messaging – so audiences and stakeholders could better understand who they were, what they did – and why.
From this we built a brand messaging toolkit. And because this is intended for anyone communicating or representing PMC in any capacity we ran a big creative session with the whole staff team to explore the new approach.
We looked at the experienced brand – and how that tells a story – as well as the more directly communicated brand. Having never worked in this way before, the staff responded brilliantly, finding the approach empowering rather than restrictive.
Sometimes it can feel like brand storytelling sits with the marketing department, but this helped people across teams see how brand impacts them, as well as how they can further its success.
