The team at Solos asked us to help them build a more fun, community-focused, modern brand incorporating their younger adventure brand – One & Co – into the wider Solos Holiday brand. Our challenge was to refresh the identity, unite their brands, help them to regroup as a team and get clear on their positioning.
A travel company with a long heritage in group tours for single travellers, Solos wanted to maintain its edge as the leader in this space and continue to attract the over 50s whilst growing a newer millennial customer base to capitalise on its success.
An ambitious brand with plans for US expansion, Solos was looking to appear more vibrant, youthful and fun than the traditional tour operators in its category – a highly competitive space where new, purpose-led competitors have recently disrupted the market.
This meant tapping into the brand’s emotional value proposition: it’s a brand that can change lives, start friendships and bring individuals from all walks of life together for sociable holidays and memorable adventures.
We ran Co-creation and Positioning workshops with key members of the team. These sessions provided an opportunity to bring people together and involve them in formulating the creative brief and defining a razor-sharp position for the company.
Sue’s co-creation session is a stroke of genius. It allows the team to come on the journey, understand the journey and feel that, even though they may not be decision makers, that it’s a very collaborative process. It’s particularly important when it’s a business that people have worked in for years and years.
Nicky Greenwood, Commercial Director, Hidden Travel Group
As well as reviewing the travel space, we used these sessions to look more widely and learn from millennial brands built on community and togetherness, and explored the bold typography and graphics of a new breed of confident tech brands.
Together we challenged and tested a list of 10 potential selling points, prioritising three primary pillars, which gave the team a clear direction for marketing and communications on their soon-to-be-launched website and ongoing content marketing.
The logo is a wordmark with a simple twist: the ‘l’ is formed from the numeral one – putting the individual literally at the centre of the brand identity.
We distilled the Solos brand foundations into a single uniting creative idea of ‘freedom together’. This brand essence captures the fundamental emotional positioning of Solos’ active and lively community – a community whose members share ideas and support one another – and it’s the driving force behind Solos attracting and retaining its loyal customers. Those life-changing moments and the friendships that are forged, bring power to Solos’ travellers – something we brought to life via the concept of a flock of birds. This also signifies direction, togetherness and flight, while one solo bird picked out in a different colour represents the individual in a group of like-minded, single travellers.
The brand guidelines set out how to select personal and emotive photography, how to use bold and confident typography, and a bright, fresh and flexible colour palette. The brand toolkit gives the in-house team a flexible brand system that incorporates sub-brands including the branding for the Solos’ community ‘club’ – Travel Circle.
There was this real need to put a stake in the ground and become known as the market leader in our field but before we could do that we had to find the right people to make sense of what is quite a complex business…I think what Sue and Rachel have done creatively, and what Nicky’s done with the words, has allowed us to communicate very succinctly with the customer. So now they’ll come to our website and totally get what we’re about. But more than that, being totally clear on where we stand allows us to be more playful and much less corporate.
Nicky Greenwood, Commercial Director, Hidden Travel Group
