Culture and Sport Glasgow was a sprawling entity in charge of almost 60 very different organisations, each with their own brand. How on earth could it bring them all under a single new identity? Frank Sutton reports

Ronseal does exactly what it says on the tin. Whatever that is. But for some brands, this isn’t enough. They have loftier goals. One such brand is Glasgow Life, the new name for a sprawling organisation that used to be called Culture and Sport Glasgow (CSG). As its old name suggests, this was the body whose remit was to run everything from libraries to sports centres to arts activities to museums in the city of Glasgow. And in early 2009 it was in the mood for change – starting with the brand.

Glasgow Life’s Lynne McPhee: “We recognised that [when CSG was founded, in 2007] we hadn’t had a great deal of time to think about the brand. The logo we’d created was reasonably corporate. It was in pink and black, wasn’t particularly exciting and didn’t say enough about us and what we did. We wanted something aspirational, not descriptive.”

Branding consultancy Tayburn was brought in to create the new identity and its MD Simon Farrell was quick to spot the size of the task ahead. “Our first analysis showed that over 55 brands were being used to communicate what CSG did. They were all unrelated to each other and they were all unrelated to CSG. It was a real mess. Our challenge was to see if we could turn what everyone accepted as a muddle into a coherent brand structure with the ultimate goal of getting more people doing more stuff in CSG’s facilities.”

“We decided to start by trying to understand what the glue was that held everything together – if there was anything. What connected a child going swimming with a ballet performance?”

Tayburn’s first job was to get to grips with the complex nature of the organisation. “We decided to start by trying to understand what the glue was that held everything together – if there was anything. What connected a child going swimming with a ballet performance at the Tramway, for example?”

McPhee provides some context: “The process involved a massive amount of discussion and consultation. Simon spent weeks traipsing around partners and customers and staff. He had six notebooks full of notes.”

The Tayburn team held one-to-one interviews with the management team, did interviews with stakeholders such as the city council, ran focus groups with customers – from kids to library users and museum goers – and conducted a series of staff workshops.

Farrell reveals some of the juiciest findings: “When we asked what CSG did, people tended to rattle off a list of facilities – libraries, leisure centres, museums. But when we asked them why, things became far more interesting.

“Glasgow is a tale of two cities. It’s Scotland’s sporting hotbed, it’s the country’s style centre. But it also contains some of the most deprived areas in Europe, with low life expectancy, drug abuse, families with four generations of people not working.

“The belief was that CSG makes the vibrant bits more vibrant and brings hope to people in the deprived areas. The more exposed people are to sport and culture the healthier they are and the more engaged they tend to be in their communities.”

This link to wellbeing is most clear with sport but Simon says someone even showed him a piece of Swedish research that found a connection between exposure to visual arts and increased life expectancy.

T
he research also showed that each year there are 14 million ‘customer occasions’. In other words, whether it’s a trip to a museum, the leisure centre, or a library, there are 14 million times each year when locals would come into contact with what CSG did. “Yet from the branding few would have known that one service was connected to another,” says Farrell. As part of the research phase, Tayburn tested a loyalty card, where people would earn points the more they went to CSG facilities. The name given to it was the Glasgow Life card.

The idea had been well-received but didn’t end up coming to fruition. However the name had really made an impression. “In many of the focus groups the feeling was that this name did a better job of encapsulating what the organisation was about than Culture and Sport Glasgow. Culture sounds high-end, sport sounds like football. And what’s the connection between the two?” 

It was as a result of this that Tayburn took a chance, stepped outside its brief and suggested CSG adopt Glasgow Life as its name. CSG went for it. But this still left the most important job – bringing the views of partners, customers and staff to life creatively.