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By The Drum Team, Editorial

May 21, 2010 | 10 min read

The Drum speaks to Alison Edbury following the unveiling of the newly created identity for specialist arts agency &co, formerly Audiences Yorkshire.

The identity overhaul was undertaken by Wonder Associates, a project which meant as well as the creation of a new brand logo, it would also develop identities for three divisions underneath the umbrella of &co, as well as the accompanying website.

Alison Edbury, chief executive of &Co, spoke to The Drum about the redevelopment of the organisation and what she hopes it now offers stakeholders and clients.

Why was the decision taken to rebrand and develop Audiences Yorkshire?

We’ve been around for a few years now, having grown out of being a small consortium of arts organisations based in the city centre of Leeds, eventually growing into a region wide agency. Over the last two or three years we did a bit of an internal stocktake. We recognised that the world is changing and we were starting to question whether we were equipped for the future, and if we weren’t then we couldn't effectively be supporting our client organisations. So we started to test out some of our thoughts about that with the members that were current, and also with some of the arts organisations who we worked with whose membership had lapsed, and we ran quite a big programme of consultation with them to ask what they thought about what we did and find whether there were support processes which were suiting their needs as organisations?

There were a few things that came out of that and one was the fact that they seemed to be quite confused about what we were there to do because we seemed to be doing a hell of a lot of stuff and not being very precise about the different areas of expertise that we had in the business. There was obviously a key communication issue there. And then there were some interesting connotations about our brand and our company name – Audiences Yorkshire.

Because we had grown up from being the Leeds Arts Consortium into a regional-wide agency, a long that time, having grown from a handful of clients to working with the real diversity of the sector, working with dance companies, touring companies, theatres, museums, galleries, print workshops, Asian led performing arts organisations – so right across the whole depth and breadth of the region. People would say to us ‘I run a major visitor attraction in the region and we don’t talk about audiences, we talk about visitors’ or ‘I am the marketing manager for a regional archive and we don’t talk about audiences, we talk about users.’ And similarly people in locations in the Humber or in Lincolnshire or North East Lincolnshire would say to us ‘We find it really difficult to feel part of Audiences Yorkshire because we’re based in Lincolnshire and we don’t necessary associate with the Yorkshire brand’. So we recognised that there are some issues and complexity about people and their organisations fitting in to what they thought we were there to do. That gave us a really clear signal and remit to think about our name and think about our positioning in the marketplace because there was a lot of positive feedback about the research services that we’ve developed over time, about the fact that people really wanted to retain the membership network and really valued that it's about bringing a peer network together and to share and develop skills and sometimes that sharing and developing of skill, just the opportunity to come together and share issues and challenges is as beneficial as sharing skills and knowledge as well.

So we recognised a lot of good in what we had established over the last 20 years, but we needed to get ahead of the times in order to continue to sustain and support the arts, cultural and leisure sectors. We’ve thought very carefully about the expanding marketplace there as well because certainly cultural and consumer boundaries have blurred between what they understand to be arts and culture and the creative industries. So somebody consuming media in their bedroom is as much a cultural experience to them as going out to a live music gig or going out to the theatre. So we’ve relaxed some of those boundaries in terms of the way that we position ourselves.

As well as the rebrand, what other activity are you set to undertake?

What we’re doing is really revealing the icing on the cake because we’ve had a troubled time over the last 18 months to 24 months. We've been rebuilding our business model and investing in new ways of working and in new tools that support us to create a much more effective relationship with our client base to enable a real effective two-way relationship. So one of the ways that we’ve done that is to invest in a customer relations management system, a web tool which enables us to log all of the relationships that we have with our clients, if it’s just a brief telephone conversation or if it’s a major piece of consultancy work which we’ve delivered and we also have a new way of working with our membership base. So each of the 123 members who are currently on our books has a personal account manager who is responsible for either picking up the phone or emailing a certain individual within an organisation and asking ‘isn’t it time we caught up to find out what you’re up to and how we can support your needs?’ Our processes of supporting or members are much more proactive and supportive with key tools and new ways of working. The other essence of &co is that we ask our clients exactly what their requirements are for the future. They are very influential in programming our industry briefings which are a regular in professional development and that way we know that we are creating content that has market needs. So we’re not spoon feeding them with what we believe they are interested in but taking a much more consultative approach.

Is that not a time consuming method of working?

We have a shared responsibility of working now. In our Leeds base we have a team of 17, not all of who are dedicated to customer relationship in that sense but essentially, if we aren’t tuned into our client's needs in that way then how can we be assured that our support and services are being taken up by the marketplace? It’s absolutely part of what we’re here to do. It is time consuming but essentially the biggest resource and the biggest cost we have is our people, but that’s the type of organisation that we are.

What sort of content will the website display?

There’s a lot of changing content on there so you get the core details of what &co is all about and an update about what different business units are delivering through &connect which is dedicated to the membership and all their design professionals sharing learning and collaborate. There will also be information about all of the industry briefings events coming up as well. The year long programme will be on there. And then there is &Consult, which is our marketing consultancy. That includes benchmarking, one of the services we have offered for four years, where we are benchmarking audience data from 14 performing arts venues. So people will be able to see what goes on there and what impact that is delivering for the participants in that project. And then there is &communicate, our on-and-offline communications channel which enables organisations to go online and build a communications campaign. So they can select which print distributions route they are interested in and build that into their online advertising campaigns.

We have created within our website a much friendlier profile of the organisation and also an opportunity for our member organisations to profile who they are on the site as well to keep each other up to date with what their likes and dislikes are and what they’re getting into culturally and professionally. So it’s much more dynamic rather than just distributing information, it’s encouraging people to contribute and populate that site with their own content.

How will social media be involved in the process?

We link into our own YouTube channel, we're building lots of AudioBoo content, we’ve also got different Tweeters within the organisations, so that’s definitely a new dimension for the website.

You’ve effectively created four new brands for the organisation with &co and its three divisions. How big a decision was that?

It was a huge decision because there is obviously a bit more work than we have got to fulfill in enabling people to understand that under the &co umbrella there are those discrete business units. So we are all part of the one organisation. We went through a really interesting creative process with Wonder Associates, who has been our key creative agency through out this whole process, thinking about what type of a name we might have wanted, what type of a brand architecture we wanted. We played out a number different scenarios around different names and brand architecture. It came out very clearly that this type of architecture, where we have the sub brands but also an over arching brand, was the one for us. The brand that Wonder has designed with us has been really effective in bringing that all together. Especially true with the online channels that we now have, because we used to have separate website which we used to have to fulfill across different business needs and we’ve put that all into one infrastructure to make it much easier for people to engage with who we are and understand who we are, but also to gain access to the information and services that we have to support people with.

How have you ensured that your audience can differentiate between each division?

That is a combination of the new brands and the new communications working effectively. We’ve done some testing already with a handful of our clients, internal stakeholders, particularly our staff, and the feedback we’ve had so far has been great. All of our new marketing collaterals and then new marketing channels do seem to be working much more effectively that the old ones. The other aspect there is that we cannot depend on the shiny new tools that we have. It’s very important that the new processes and the ethos that we have embedded in the organisation about being proactive and out there communicating with our clients, having cultural conversations with a wide diversity of cultural organisations locally, regionally and nationally with consumers, and we found that we have to change our way of working and we’ve already started to do that in terms of changes of engagement with our members. This has highlighted some really positive feedback already. But we can’t sit back on our laurels though. We have to work hard at this and develop.

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