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Work in Norwich – WiN every day
In 2022, we proudly launched Work in Norwich – a brand to promote Norwich as an unbeatable place to live and work. This is a project a long time in the making, born from a direct ask from BID businesses who wanted support recruiting – and retaining – top talent.
We begin in 2019, with the launch of Norwich, the City of Stories. This new place-brand for the city – based on extensive research and stakeholder engagement – stems from our literary heritage, but is also a celebration of the breadth and depth of the city’s character: its history spanning over a thousand years; the enormous number of independent businesses that you can find here; our unique relationship with the coast and the broads national park. The brand was nominated for international place brand of the year at the City Nation Place awards in 2020 – you can read all about the new place brand, here.
Initially focused on promoting Norwich as a tourist destination, our ambitions were always to extend ‘Norwich, the City of Stories’ beyond the tourism brief, to showcase Norwich as an exceptional place to live and work, as well as visit. And in 2020, our opportunity arose when Norwich City Council was awarded a Town Deal by the UK government – a fund designed to deliver projects with the city’s economic prosperity in mind.
Norwich BID was commissioned to deliver a new marketing arm for Norwich: a brand and campaign to shine a spotlight on Norwich as a place to live and work. The project’s objectives were threefold:
- Support staff recruitment and retention in the city
- To contribute to cluster growth
- Attract inward investment
Norwich brand agency ‘The Click’ were appointed to work on the brief, and rigorous research (across a vast stakeholder landscape) began in summer 2021. We sought to understand perceptions of the city inside and outside of it, and – in doing so – identify the barriers and drivers when it came to living and working here.
First, a name: ‘Work in Norwich’. A name that sits comfortably alongside our ‘VisitNorwich’ brand, and one that feels clear and direct. Also, happily, ‘WiN’ for short – and so the ‘WiN every day’ campaign was born.
Next, positioning. From our research we recognised the city’s distinctiveness as a fantastic place to live. 6 campaign messages were identified – authentic and true – and accordingly 6 real-life case studies brought this content to life. Each case study (captured beautifully by Eye Film, with photography by Fiona Burrage) focusses on a different quality of life in Norwich; a different ‘WiN’, that can be felt and experienced daily, here.
Go wild swimming in the Broads national park, before a day at the office. Be part of a close community – from research to restaurateurs and entrepreneurs. Walk or scoot to work, through historic streets. And – when the day’s work is done – head to the spectacular coast or countryside that’s right on your doorstep.
By October 2021, we had a brand, campaign, assets, and an extensive new website containing extensive information for anyone looking to move, or locate their business here. We created a carefully targeted campaign to run in January: our biggest and most comprehensive campaign to date running across digital and outdoor, in north London and Essex.
The results were beyond anything we’d predicted: the campaign achieved 39 million impressions, and our creative performed above industry benchmarks on all display and video advertising. From google trends we could see enormous uplift in searches related to living and working in Norwich, and within the city, we could see local businesses using the assets, and sharing pictures of themselves with the advertising they’d encountered at Liverpool street, and across the London tube network.
Overall, over 92,000 people clicked on our campaign in a 6 week period. And not only was the campaign performance beyond our expectations, but the learnings we got out of the exercise were invaluable: having 6 messages to test throughout the campaign meant that we were able to identify which campaign create spoke to different audiences, and what people were looking for once they’d engaged with our advertising. This is the first time we’d run a campaign like this, with these objectives, so as we look at future activity for the brand these insights will guide the decisions we make.
Since, WiN has garnered the attention of Norwich Businesses, and the place management industry alike. University of East Anglia now link to WiN in all of their recruitment resources, and the local NHS trust have used our films, as have Aviva. We were invited to talk at UK Place Branding Conference ‘City Nation Place’, and won the award for ‘Best Marketing and Branding Scheme’ at the Association of Town and City Management awards.
And there’s more to come.
Though the Town Deal finished funding the campaign at the end of 2022, we have big ambitions for WiN. Since the campaign ended, we’ve been engaging the business community in the work that we’re doing, partnering with key events that support cluster growth, and collecting stories that illustrate some inspirational relocation journeys.
If you would like to help support WiN, please contact Katia Bentley