Experience is the new luxury. If you are what you share, then make it worth watching.
We love a bit of speed. We find we do some of our best work when we’re up against it — there’s something about the blood, sweat and tears of a tight deadline. It’s intense of course, but running a design sprint unlocks our limbic minds and always leads to beautiful results. Plus, we rather like it in the fast lane.
So when an ex-Formula One racing driver approached us to design a brand and website for his race and track driving experiences, let’s just say we were keen as mustard.
If experience is the new luxury, then wild, high speed, one-of-a-kind race experiences behind the wheel of a Formula One car are pretty much the ultimate. It sounded good to us too. Unfortunately, sounding good isn’t always quite enough. For a brand to really cut through, it’s not just about igniting the spark, it’s about making a connection.
We wanted viewers to be able to see their own beliefs and values in our client’s brand and be drawn to the promise of belonging to its exclusive community of like-minded people. Both message and medium needed to celebrate the stuff that makes racing exciting — speed, drama and exclusivity.
Spending time with our client — an ex-racing driver — helped us to understand how people talked and thought about the sport and enabled us to write a brief for ourselves in terms of how the brand should look, feel and sound.
Research shows that luxury travellers have a growing appetite for experiences that show them a new perspective of the world. Our role was to package our client’s pedigree into transformational travel opportunities discovered through a new lens of insider insight.
Racing fans want to heighten their association with the sport, getting as close as they can to the action and experiencing that feeling of being on the edge. We took that aspiration and emotional edge through to the design of the brand mark — built from the letter R, focusing on its curves and forward-facing momentum to evoke speed, dynamic focus and the bends of a racetrack. The focus is on the essential, the experience, with the R of the brand title carving its own track.
From brand design aesthetic to attention to detail, our client’s online presence needed to set the pace and create an immersive world for consumers — putting them at the centre of the action straight away.
The reportage-style ‘in the action’ photography highlights the experience, sparks emotion and appeals to the senses while the design and language initiates viewers into the world of racing, bringing the vision to life. It needed to be fun, engaging, pulse-raising and exciting — after all, this is about unique destinations and bespoke experiences that make their customer the hero of the story. Because in a world where you are what you share, you might as well make it worth watching.
