From its inception, collaboration has been central to We Are Staffordshire’s place-making activity, activating a brand and vision that everyone can stand behind and feel part of.
To understand the initial perceptions of Staffordshire, a specialist place marketing agency, thinkingplace, were commissioned in late 2019 to canvas key stakeholders across the county and beyond. This not only helped to provide clarity on our challenges and opportunities, but ultimately informed our structure for what was to become We Are Staffordshire’s bold new narrative, brand and strategy.
Our approach centred around the Staffordshire Story: bringing together different organisations and brands, each with their own priorities and sense of identity, together under one overarching vision.
With a 100 per cent capital investment over a three-year pilot period by Staffordshire County Council, We Are Staffordshire was born in late 2020; a time of huge challenges for local authorities, faced with a global pandemic. Yet Staffordshire’s leadership saw the work as an opportunity to drive post-COVID recovery; to try something new, and allocated funding to support the work.
A Place Brand Manager was appointed with a mission to bring the county’s place brand to life and in April 2021, a new place marketing strategy was developed, harnessing Staffordshire’s greatest assets: its businesses, attractions and people. We had a clear vision for the work to be place and private sector led and secured representation from businesses large and small including JCB, the National Memorial Arboretum, Keele and Staffordshire University, in addition to innovative SMEs such as Woolcool (winner of a Queen’s Enterprise Award for Sustainability).
We Are Staffordshire developed a programme of bold and unique activities that brought our county’s visitor economy, investment and district and borough partners together as a collective, under one unified brand and voice. We ‘learned by doing’ as we navigated the reopening of the UK post-COVID, trying new approaches and building lasting relationships.
Focus was given to key priorities: Fostering collaboration at the heart of all we do; Staffordshire focused engagement to win local hearts and minds, and marketing our county beyond its borders to raise awareness, and put our county on the map.
The mission in establishing We Are Staffordshire was to:
- Develop an overarching vision, strategy and place brand for Staffordshire that everyone could believe in
- Collaborate with teams delivering inward investment, increased visitor economy, skills and education/research to further support prosperity in Staffordshire, through delivery of value-add events and profile-raising activities
- Raise positive awareness of and instil pride in the Staffordshire ‘place brand’ inside and beyond Staffordshire’s borders by using the voice of stakeholder partners as ‘ambassadors’ in all Staffordshire has to offer
- Engage, make connections with, and influence target stakeholders at a national level to amplify Staffordshire’s voice and influence around key local priorities
A multi-channel marketing approach was adopted, including:
- Both hosting and taking a presence at virtual and physical events, including quarterly ambassador events hosted across the county, strategic roundtables, and thought leadership
- Sponsorship of a number of partner awards and events
- The launch of a Staffordshire ambassador network, bringing together a salesforce for Staffordshire who could share the Staffordshire Story inside and beyond the county’s borders
- A library of vibrant and inspiring marketing collateral tied to bold campaigns
- Ongoing communications engagement through digital and social media channels – including a bespoke ‘ambassador portal’ containing a library of branded assets for partners to use