Art at the Edge of the World
Last June, For The People was appointed to rebrand the Perth International Arts Festival. I worked with my colleagues Jo Roca, Mel Baillache, Damian Borchok and Sunil Badami on rethinking how people experience the festival.
People don’t usually cry when I interview them for brand projects, but when they do — it’s a pretty good signal that I’ve uncovered an insight that really hits home.
That’s exactly what happened when Mel and I interviewed a writer about her favourite moment at the Perth Festival. She spoke about a beautiful ballet piece choreographed by Merce Cunningham, performed on an open-air stage over Cottesloe Beach as the sun set over the water. Her emotion was infectious. I still get goose bumps thinking about it… one year later.
Let me explain.
The Perth International Arts Festival is the longest-running international arts festival in Australia, and Western Australia’s premier cultural event. Yet in recent years, the festival’s relevance, audience numbers, and earnings had begun to decline significantly. Our task was to challenge their internal thinking on about how to bring the festival to market, and to boldly reset audience expectations. In other words, bring back the festival magic that could only happen in Perth. We needed to capture that ballet-on-the-beach-at-sunset moment.
Here at For The People, we have no shortage of experience in the arts and culture sector. Collectively, the team has worked on Queensland Theatre, Griffin Theatre, Melbourne Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Edinburgh Festival, The Sydney Pavilion at Shanghai Biennale, Opera Australia, the 20th Biennale of Sydney and QAGOMA. But getting our hands on a festival that had a rich history, a unique and remote location, and an urgent commercial challenge to overcome, felt like a mandate not only for a design solution but for whole-of-organisation change.
The problem with arts festivals
We quickly uncovered a problem with festivals as a category: they suffer from the ‘McDonalds-isation’ trend. Worldwide, many festivals run the risk of becoming alike: often the programming is similar, relying on the latest hit shows doing the festival rounds.
Plus, there’s the ivory tower problem — many cultural institutions who expect their customers to find and interpret cultural experiences, but lose sight of helping the every ay person interpret that art.
Finally, the Perth Festival risked becoming a collection of individual acts that came and went every year, rather than a complete experience in its own right. The programme is a real opportunity to reflect the place and drive attendees’ engagement — not only with art, but with Perth itself.
The brief: intense pride
The functional brief was clear: to increase audience numbers. But the emotional brief was where the opportunity was: build intense pride in a festival grounded in Western Australia.
Mel said it well:
“One thing that so many people from Perth say, is that when the festival is on, it’s the best time to be in Perth — the weather, the events, the people, it all just somehow comes together perfectly to create this vibe in the city.
I think while people knew it was festival time, we needed in some ways to make this more visible and connected to Perth Festival.”
Here’s a snippet from our client brief, below.👇
“We want the people of Western Australia to feel with intense pride that their festival is the essence of Western Australia and they cannot imagine life here without it.”
With that in mind, we got to work, jetting over to Perth for a day of back-to-back-to-back interviews with current Perth Festival employees, board members, friends of the festival, patrons, and lapsed patrons. It’s worth saying that we didn’t just interview fans of the festival — we also interviewed nay-sayers, people who felt that the Perth Festival had lost its way, and Fringe Festival devotees…which was helpful as we started to unpack what was working and what wasn’t.
Defining ‘Perthness’
As we worked, it became immediately clear that the Perth Festival identity, and brand experience needed to be a world-class experience that you could only have in Perth. We quickly started looking at what made Perth, Perth.
We looked at everything — literature by authors from Western Australia, the biodiversity of the region, the way people from Perth spoke, the flora that makes up the scent of Western Australia, and the way that a Western Australian sunset looks over the water.
So, with all that in mind…we needed to imagine how we might translate this Perthness into a Perth Festival experience.
Working it Out
We call our presentations ‘work outs’, because they’re quite rough-and-ready. What you see below is what we presented to the Perth Festival team in our workout. We made some top-line tactical recommendations, including rethinking the friends of the festival program to a greater impact on the success of the festival, connecting more effectively with audiences, rethinking the printed program, building a new website, sharpening the festival’s marketing impact by prioritising energy on a few ‘tent pole’ performances, building an identity beyond the programming, and telling donors a more compelling story about their impact on the city and the festival (and empowering Perth Festival to make the case for further donations).
After we took initial feedback from the team, it was time to work up our rough thinking into something that the organisation could use as a clear compass to guide decisions about programming, marketing, and the festival experience.
Art in a Different Light
When we interviewed stakeholders, customers, and friends of the festival about their favourite memories of the festival, we heard stories about the magic of the festival. People spoke about the opening night of the festival in 2017 (which included a multimedia-and-multisensory walk through the biodiversity of Western Australia’s flora and fauna), the feather wonderland that marked the 60th anniversary of the festival, and parade of giant marionettes that took over Perth’s streets in 2015. Truly, art in a different light.
“Art in a different light” became the north star for the festival experience. Perth in the summer really is a sight to behold — nearly everyone we spoke with described the sunsets, the festival ‘buzz’ and the beautiful summer weather as a reasons to be out-and-about in Perth. Tonally, the brand needed to reflect the place and people of Perth.
This became the foundation for a narrative for the Perth Festival.
“Things are different over here. At the edge of Australia, at the edge of the world, our lifestyle, our environment, our history provides us with a singularly distinctive outlook on how we celebrate our own creativity and culture — and embrace the very best that humanity has to offer from anywhere on the planet.
Every summer since 1953 our town fills with music, dance, stories, conversations and laughter. Bright and bold and refreshingly down-to-earth, our festival’s made for locals — but we invite everyone to jump in, and experience art in a different light.”
The identity takes its inspiration from the place itself. Western Australia is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, it’s home of the Noongar people, and it’s the last place the day’s light touches Australia. Perth’s sunsets are legendary — as the sun sets over the water, at the edge of the earth, colours are seen that could only be experienced there. The Perth Festival experience should reflect this unique place in the world, and encourage people who wouldn’t describe themselves as ‘arty’ to attend one (or hopefuly more!) of the events hosted by Perth Festival.
We worked with our friends at S1T2 to rethink the festival website to be user-friendly, while also incorporating the new identity.
We also rethought the brand voice. The festival program is a major driver of ticket sales, so we helped to ensure the language used in it was clear and evoked the specific, unique experiences visitors would enjoy at the festival. To do this, we developed a tone of voice that was modelled on the idea of a Western Australian tour guide — someone who was laid back, straight-up, and easy to understand. This gave audiences a clear idea of the experience they’d have, helping them to navigate art (and Western Australia) in a way that was true to the place and people of Western Australia.
Rethinking the Festival Experience
At its best, branding can be a Trojan horse for a new way of thinking and behaving. In this case, we wanted to set a strategy that would help the festival define itself, help the city (and local businesses) participate in (and build momentum around) the festival, design an experience with users in mind, and do it all with enough of an impact in the first year of the rebrand that we could be sure that there would be a next year.
A Big Push…and a Big Result
At different points over the last 8 months it felt like the whole studio was working on this project. And whilst this was a lot of work, it has been a favourite to work on — it’s rare that a team is so aligned from the get-go about the problem, the mandate for change, the scale of change, and the boldness of the ambition and behaviour.
But the real question was — did all of this effort move the needle?
In short, yes.
In just one year, Perth Festival saw significant results. The brand relaunched in November 2017, and has already found success — smashing expectations with the total audience increasing from 350k to 450k (across free and ticketed events). Now that the team has just wrapped up their first festival under the rebrand, we’ve seen some immediate and impactful results.
Where To From Here?
This is just the beginning. The plans for next year’s festival are in the works, and the team are ready to dial up ‘Perthness’, and the Perth Festival experience even further. We can’t say too much, but we can say this — if you’re planning a trip to Perth, we’d highly recommend keeping your calendar open for February 2019.
Watch this space, folks.
