Championing a love of local, driving footfall back into high-street businesses, and reigniting community pride.
NewcastleGateshead Initiative (NGI) is the destination promotion and inward investment agency for Newcastle, Gateshead, and the wider North East England region. It works with stakeholders, policy-makers and strategic partners to drive innovation, investment, and business growth that brings lasting social and economic benefits to the people of the area.
The brief for this project was to position and promote six of Newcastle’s diverse neighbourhoods as individual ‘urban villages’ in the style of London’s boroughs, reinvigorating local business and demonstrating to residents and visitors from the wider vicinity that each of these unique high-street destinations is safe (in a post-Covid world),appealing, and offers a wide choice of services to the shopper and leisure-seeker.
At the core of this Welcome Back campaign was the launch of the GeordieStreet app – a free-todownload hub hosting consumer information on shops, cafés, sports and leisure attractions and other places to enjoy in each key neighbourhood, in turn providing local businesses with a platform for promoting news, offers and discounts to a wider, primed audience. Our response to the challenge was a campaign idea born out of a deep immersion in sentiment research findings, which highlighted a real sense of positive community spirit – people in Newcastle are demonstrably proud of their neighbourhoods and keen to share what makes them so special. Qualitative feedback brought each of the areas to life in a very personal sense, and this inspired the ‘We are…’ concept: a manifesto that truly belongs to its people – both businesses and residents. First we established the umbrella brand: ‘We are Newcastle, diverse neighbourhoods in a distinctive city’. Then we introduced each of the local neighbourhoods with its own distinct character, using quirky imagery and fonts to really allow the different personalities to shine out.
Informed by consumer insight, we defined these personalities as:
- Heaton: quirky, foodie and independent, vibrant with variety
- Ouseburn: arty and eclectic, with a laid-back attitude and indie vibes
- Quayside: café-bar culture with wow-factor waterside views
- Gosforth: where bustling high street meets green park oasis
- Byker: buzzing with bargains for the canny shopper, and real community spirit
- Elswick: where a world of cultures meets, eats and treats