Prêmios • 16 05 2019

Our work for Macmillan Cancer Support shortlisted for DESIGN WEEK AWARDS 2019

We’re incredibly proud to announce that our work for Macmillan Cancer Support has been shortlisted for the Brand Strategy category at the Design Week Awards 2019. We’re looking forward to the awards ceremony on 20th June at the Science Museum in London.

More than 20 expert judges came together to decide on the shortlist which shows a high level of innovation and customer-focused design, across the design spectrum.

Our strategy work was part of an extensive brand transformation for Macmillan that we worked on over the last two years.

Macmillan Cancer Support is the UK’s largest and most trusted cancer support charity, providing support to people living with cancer from point of diagnosis and throughout their whole cancer experience.

Despite being a nationally-celebrated charity with award-winning brand design effectiveness and a powerful growth story, Macmillan found itself ‘well known but not known well’. They had high awareness, but a lower understanding of the value of their support. Many perceived them as just being about nurses, or purely for those who are critically or terminally ill. But Macmillan’s support is far broader than just immediate health challenges. They offer physical, financial and emotional support for everyone with cancer. Their offer is even more relevant given the changing cancer story. More people are living with, rather than dying from cancer – and that presents more whole-life challenges.

Macmillan needed to refocus the brand to grow their relevance to all of their audiences and to help make a greater difference to people living with cancer. To make sense of all Macmillan does, they needed to unite a diverse group of people, working for or on behalf of Macmillan, behind a clear purpose. They needed to define what makes theirs a valuable and meaningful experience and to guide future decision-making around the service and support offer.

We worked in a highly collaborative way, with input from many different stakeholders – from people living with cancer to healthcare professionals, volunteers, fundraisers and internal audiences. It was a complex project, one that needed an open and inclusive approach to working, with a lot of sensitivity and empathy.

We created a new brand purpose which would be relevant to all audiences: To help everyone with cancer live life as fully as they can. Then, we developed a simpler brand framework to help the whole organisation think and talk about what Macmillan do in a more consistent and powerful way, with a tighter and more cohesive story.

We developed brand Experience Principles to define what makes a recognisable Macmillan brand experience. They reflect the good work Macmillan already do but stretch and challenge the organisation to go further. They make the strategy relevant to everyone in their day-to-day work – from how people talk and manage calls to their support line, to how people experience fundraising events like World’s Biggest Coffee Morning – as well as how services are designed for the future. They inspire the people who get Macmillan support to go on and give the brand support in return.

We believe in leaving a legacy on brand projects, with teams motivated and capable of keeping up brand momentum well into the future. So we’ve supported Macmillan’s Brand Champions programme and created brand training toolkits to support the internal launch and engagement. We’ve also run workshops to embed the brand thinking and make it connect with the reality of support services across the organisation.

We’ll be speaking with our client at Macmillan at Creativebrief Explores in London on June 5th on the topic of collaboration. Click here to find out more.

Click below to view the case study!

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