Building Upon a Firm Foundation

As with many independent schools, King’s Worcester has faced and continues to face increasing competition from other independent and state schools within the local area of Worcestershire. The challenges faced by King’s are typical of many schools—increased competition at both Prep and Sixth Form levels – due in part to the overall high standard of provision within the Midlands. Our task was to enhance the existing school branding to better communicate added value and improve the visibility of the school’s unique offerings.

King’s Worcester opted for a bespoke version of our Brand Slingshot for Schools programme, with the resultant series of projects occurring over a period of 12 weeks. We began with a deep dive into the King’s community, culture, and strategic plan, running multiple focus groups, interviews, and internal/external surveys across each of the individual schools. The King’s Foundation is unique in that it has two Prep Schools under its umbrella: King’s St Alban’s, an inner-city Prep adjacent to its Senior school, and King’s Hawford, a satellite Prep located in the lush Worcestershire countryside. Through perceptual mapping and parent research, we identified key differences within each provision, which aided in the development of school branding materials geared towards each school.

One of the deliverables for the King’s brand development project was to enhance and develop the existing brand mantra, ‘Shaped by King’s’. Our intent was to develop the idea with a renewed focus on the individual and the resultant outcome of the King’s experience – enhanced future opportunities. The resultant developed line for the brand is now ‘Shape Your Future’, with an extended version being ‘Shape Your Future with King’s’. This developed line better communicates the King’s Foundation’s focus on character development and confidence building, integral aspects of effective school branding.

Alongside the development of a new brand mantra, we were asked to develop the established King’s Foundation Values into a more accessible format, with added depth and communications flexibility. These five values of Ambition, Creativity, Kindness, Humility, and Resilience were reformatted for outward-facing communications and augmented with additional copywriting. As part of the linguistic development, we overhauled the Brand Voice guidelines, opting for a more grounded and approachable tone of voice, further strengthening the school branding.

Once the verbal equity development was completed, we turned our attention to the aesthetic elements of the brand. A supplementary colour system was developed, allowing for greater differentiation across each of the school provisions. To add a more premium touch, a gold tint was introduced, alongside a new primary typeface and layout styles. The resultant design style presents a much truer representation of the exemplary standard of a King’s education, enhancing the overall school branding.

Special thanks must go to Emily Ward, King’s Director of Marketing, for being a fantastic collaborative partner across both the brand development project and our ongoing initiatives.

If you are looking for similar results to our school branding collaboration with King’s Worcester, why not reach out to us for a more detailed explainer of the benefits of the Quantock Slingshot programme.