Roles
Brand Conception, Strategy, Launch, Rollout
Art and Creative Direction
Stakeholder Engagement
Executive Sell-through
Market Research
Community Engagement
Collaborators
Owen Jones
Studio DAD
Sparks and Sullivan
KEF Communications
Summary
Rebranded Metro, greater Portland’s regional government.
Metro, greater Portland’s regional government, was officially formed in 1979. It grew out of a need to balance keeping farms and forests intact while allowing the area to grow and develop. No one wanted the sprawl of California to be up here. Over the years, Metro’s brand became more and more cumbersome and unwieldy as they added a Parks department, garbage and recycling planning, running the area’s biggest venues like the Oregon Zoo and the Convention Center. No one inside or outside the organization knew how to describe the many things the government did, and as a result, the brand itself lacked a strong core visual identity. With every department, program and promotion, employees filled the gap by creating their own sub-brands.
No wonder 67% of residents didn’t know who Metro was or what it did.
My biggest research breakthrough came when I realized how critical it is to humanize government. It will take a lot of steady effort to counter 40-years of conservative talking points meant to denigrate the public sector.
With every Instagram story told about restoring a rare ecosystem they can soon experience firsthand; when they visit the Oregon Zoo and see how they’re working to protect the future of wildlife; when Metro employees tabling at a public event speak to the importance of their work to steward our collective assets like the Schnitzer and Newmark responsibly, when businesses thrive because the Oregon Convention Center draws people from all over the world to enjoy all that the greater Portland region has to offer, residents begin to see how the priorities they vote for on ballot measures come to life.
All these efforts increase event attendance, boost park visits, maximize employee engagement and yield greater numbers of high-quality job applications —especially by prospective employees from historically marginalized communities. These efforts also increase all parts of Metro through bus ads, radio ads, PDX Parent magazine ads, cross-marketing with Metro venues. They help generate voter support to pass regional bonds and regional levies by the highest percentages ever.
I was hired initially to create and execute a marketing plan for the Metro Parks and Nature department. They thought it might require a new logo for the department. Within three weeks, it became clear that leaders needed to re-brand the entire government. I immediately joined a new team of brilliant Metro co-workers, and together, we worked non-stop for nine months to make it happen.
We created the brand strategy, then shopped it around to get input and feedback from internal and external stakeholders, including our toughest critics within the Metro Communications Department, the elected Metro Council, executive leaders across Metro’s business lines, and residents from across the region and a wide range of ages, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds.
We then hired a team of super-talented creatives (thank you, Peter and Tess of Owen Jones and now Studio DAD) to design the new logo. We tested. We surveyed. We tweaked the mark until we landed on something dense enough to tell Metro’s multi-layered story, and un-packable enough to keep people’s attention as they looked more closely. It’s a strong mark befitting a giant, unwieldy, multi-faceted organization who need to tell their complicated story quickly, clearly and succinctly.
We wrote a set of phrases to include with the lock-up that describe Metro’s lines of work: land and transportation, parks and nature, garbage and recycling, arts and events. We created figures from the images embedded in the mark, and then animated them to tell Metro’s story in 90 seconds.
The new brand streamlined production of marketing and outreach materials across the organization, ensuring brand cohesion no matter who creates materials within the 1,200-person government. Within two years of the new brand’s debut, Metro passed a levy and a bond by the largest margin in its history. Social media followings grew, engagement increased across all platforms, and once sparsely attended events and classes suddenly needed wait lists.
The clear, succinct brand narrative helps employees tell the Metro story. Today, employees enthusiastically attach the mark, the animation, and the chart describing the business lines to their presentations both inside and outside the organization. While they’d always known their specific role and responsibilities, now they can speak to Metro’s role in the region and understand their role within the greater story.
And now, for the first time in 40 years, people across the region can see how Metro’s important work helps make this a great place to call home.
