With a significant milestone anniversary year coming up, Discover the World invited us to conduct a brand review that would inform their brand strategy, refine their positioning and refresh their brand identity, ensuring their continued success in this competitive field.
Innovative travel company, Discover the World has specialised in creating adventure holidays for 40 years. In order to maintain and build on their position in a sector they’d been instrumental in creating, they needed help defining and articulating what it is that sets them apart.
Discover the World’s tailor-made trips offer a sustainable way of exploring the wildlife, stunning landscapes and vibrant cultures that are off the beaten track. The vision of founder, Clive Stacey, who pioneered the idea of experiencing the true magic of places by seeing them through insiders’ eyes, continues to drive the business to this day. While the brand is at an exciting point in its history, with new team members joining and ambitions to grow, the travel market is becoming more crowded with disruptive new companies moving into their space.
Although they are much-loved by their core customer base, Discover the World realised that, in a noisy digital world, their branding had to do more to break through and capture people’s attention. Evocative photography alone wasn’t enough to stand out in this category. There was a need to subtly reposition the brand in a way that would resonate with existing and new customers alike – building on their heritage and reputation while competing with bold, new market entrants.
This brand refresh was always going to be about evolution rather than revolution, with the changes needed to achieve that all-important cut-through, applied sensitively. The brand review exercise was extensive and involved the client team getting very specific about defining what sustainability means to them in practical terms.
With the Discover the World brand being much loved by their current customers (typically 50+), we were aware that any changes that needed to be made to increase reach and gain that all-important cut-through, had to be applied with sensitivity and nuance.
We ran an extensive brand review exercise before making recommendations with client and customer interviews, category and competitor research and customer and staff surveys. This stage also involved taking the senior leadership team through an internal discovery workshop.
With sustainability much more than just a buzzword in the travel sector, we encouraged our client to get specific about what ‘sustainability’ meant to them. Discover the World cares deeply about the protection of wildlife and wilderness as well as supporting the local communities that make up their destinations. More specifically however, we discovered that their passion for promoting travel and the opportunities it offers young people was already being expressed through their funding bursaries for less advantaged young people. This initiative is closely linked to their sister education brand which sees them taking schools and universities on geography and language trips: Every trip booked by their customers, contributes towards their Education Bursary Fund.
It has been an absolute delight working with Sue Bush and her very talented team at The Co-Foundry on the review of our brand strategy. We wanted to revitalise our brand so it stood out more and also resonated with younger audiences whilst remaining true to our heritage.
Georgina Hancock, Marketing & Partnerships Director
Taking our lead from the vision of Discover the World founder Clive Stacey, who continues to work in the business to this day, we identified and articulated the tagline that the brand lives by – Always Exploring, as well as developing a 40th anniversary creative campaign – Seeing the World Differently.
Recognising that the Discover the World mark is well-established and loved, we made a small but significant change – refining the Arctic tern bird motif so that it’s less in hover and more in dynamic flight, at the same time filling the negative space in the ‘D’.
The Arctic tern has one of Earth’s longest annual migrations, flying from breeding grounds in the Arctic to summer in Antarctica. We paid homage to this remarkable journey through the introduction of a flight path device, used either subtly to overlay images and draw your eye through to a photograph’s focal point or as a device to add richness to social media posts, for example.
Drawing on those flight path lines, we developed an extension for occasional use as illustrations.
And created a new brand language, modernising the brand’s typography and extending the Discover the World colour palette.
We love our new brand! The Co-Foundry worked collaboratively with us throughout, taking care to understand our business, our clients and our market and used this insight to review our brand positioning and shape our new re-energised creative direction. They delivered a suite of assets that we can use across our marketing channels to ensure continuity of our marketing communications and helped us to create a more dynamic, fun and down to earth tone of voice that showcases our personality.
Georgina Hancock, Marketing & Partnerships Director
We provided social templates and email marketing templates for use by the marketing team:
And, through the use of commissioned photography, we gave expression to something that is of paramount importance to their clients – that their personalised trips are delivered by a small and independent team of genuine local experts who actively listen to their customers’ wish lists and exceed their expectations.
Our comprehensive discovery and research stages helped us tease out the values that are fundamental to the business and develop tone of voice guidance that better reflects the brand’s playful spirit of adventure.
Having helped define the new company-wide values, we ran a series of Values in Action workshops, across two days for all 80 members of the Discover the World team.
Having worked with the Co-Foundry to establish and hone our company values, it was very important to our business that our values were not just words, but how we live and breathe daily. Additionally, we wanted to ensure alignment of our values across the two distinct divisions of our business [Travel and Education]. Sue encouraged storytelling amongst the participants in the ‘Values in Action’ workshops and this brought everything we’d been working on to life. The workshops were supportive and engaging, and this created an environment where even the most reticent of people felt able to make their contribution.
Sue Thorne, Head of People, Discover the World
