The Scouts are 113 years old this year and are now the largest national Scout organization in Europe representing about 35% of the European region’s total Scouting Membership. In the UK, membership numbers stand at 460,000 boys and girls and 160,000 adult volunteers.
As this is the Scouts first major rebranding exercise since 2001, Brandbuilding.works thought it would be interesting to chat with Chris James, Brand and Ambassador Manager at Scouts, about their new identity.
Where did you start with the rebrand?
First of all, it was building the case for a rebrand. It’s not the sort of project you want to take on unless you’ve got a really good reason, especially when you’ve got a huge movement to take with you. There’s never a great moment to say “Hey everyone, we’re changing the logo!”
Change is never easy and a rebrand is often seen as an unnecessary expense but we looked at a number of factors and it was clear to us that a change was needed.
Our visual identity was 20 years old, a great job at the time but it was a brand for a different age. There was no social media, no Facebook, no Twitter back then. It was a brand designed primarily for print because that was the world we were living in.
There’s never a great moment to say “Hey everyone, we’re changing the logo!”
Also we’d added various bits to it since 2001. For example In 2008 we added a typeface, and we moved away from the use of the Scout green and purple to only using the purple. It had actually become rather piecemeal as even a cursory look online showed the Scouts brand had begun to fragment in the most alarming way. There were new elements being added, elements missing, and different colours being used, creating a lot of confusion and very little consistency. But most importantly, and putting the visual identity to one side, people had lost sight of who we are.
If we stopped someone in the street and asked them what they thought Scouts were all about, on the positive end of the spectrum they would say things like “They’re doing good work”, “They’re putting kids on the right path” and that sort of thing but at the other end of the spectrum it would be “I don’t see them anymore”, “uniforms and badges? Do they still exist?”, “Don’t know, they’re not in my world”.
If people don’t understand what we do then it’s very unlikely that they’re going to engage with us.
And we had some pretty sobering focus group sessions where the people taking part hadn’t been told they would be talking about Scouts specifically. I was introduced as the ‘note taker’ and the sort of things we heard clearly indicated that we had a major perception and awareness problem.
If people don’t understand what we do then it’s very unlikely that they’re going to engage with us.
So the medium or channel of communication had a bearing on the decision to rebrand?
Yes that’s right, we have a huge following on Facebook but we were having to break our own branding guidelines to operate on the platform. We’d taken to just using the fleur de lis without the full logo and we’d also started talking about ‘Skills for Life” as our central idea without having formalised it into our brand.
Who are you targeting with the ‘Skill for Life’ strapline?
Skills for life isn’t quite a strapline – it describes our key benefits and lies at the heart of our brand. Our customers are primarily the mums, dads and carers, so for young people aged between 6 – 13 they are the ones making the buying decisions. And what do they want? They want their kids to be great team players, they want them to be great listeners, have great resilience, maybe develop some leadership skills, and certainly to develop some sense of independence.
We did a lot of research with parents and carers asking them what they wanted for their children and that’s what came back. They didn’t necessarily want them learn how to light fires or how to use a compass, they wanted them to develop those soft skills. The most popular practical skill they wanted them to learn was first aid.
So it became pretty obvious that these needed to be the key drivers for the revised brand proposition.
We tested five different propositions with our key audiences: Fun & Friends; Adventure; Skills for life; social/community impact, and; Virtues and values.
The one that everyone came back with, whether it was parents, old or young people, the general public -– they all said “your territory is skills for life” so it just felt like the right one to take forward.
But we didn’t want to turn our back on ‘Fun and Friends’, and ‘Adventure’ as that brings in the young people so the idea we developed was to talk about ‘Skills for life’ but show ‘Fun and friends’ and ‘Adventure’ in the imagery linked to brand.
For example, whereas before we might have shown someone on a climbing wall with messaging to the effect of ‘Come and have fun’, people couldn’t see the benefit or understand why we existed as there are lots of places you can have fun.
So this answered the question and sets out our purpose very simply and succinctly. Q: ‘Why do Scouts exist?’ A: ‘To give young people skills for life’. We turn the volume up and down. We talk about skills for life much more to parents for example, and not to the 13 year olds or under.
How are you dealing with the individual sections like Beavers, Cubs and Scouts, are you phasing out the individual sub-brands?
The Beavers and Cubs in particular have got a strong individual identity and Cubs celebrated their Centenary in 2016.
Young people in Beavers, Cubs, and Scouts feel very much part of their sections, that’s their world. To the extent that I remember when my son left Beavers, it was almost like a divorce. When I said “it’s time for you to be a Cub now”, he looked around his room at all the Beaver merchandise and said “but what about all this?”, it was a real wrench for him.
So the section sub-brands are very much part of their world and Beavers and Cubs especially are still based on the ones created in 2001, they’re just evolutions of those. But we are moving towards a more ‘family’ approach to our branding.
The rational benefit is what pulls people in but unless they feel that sense of belonging it’s very unlikely that they’re going to stay.
How are you addressing the relationship between ‘Skills for life’ and that sense of belonging for the members?
Well that’s interesting because when we did the thinking behind the brand we identified that we had a rational benefit which was the ‘Skills for Life’, but the emotional benefit is in fact ‘belonging’, and that’s a difficult thing to package up and sell.
The rational benefit is what pulls people in but unless they feel that sense of belonging it’s very unlikely that they’re going to stay.
You built the case for the rebrand. Who did you then have to convince?
Well we had to convince our board and it came with an element of risk as ultimately the individual Scout groups would have to shoulder some cost in terms of updating their signage and other collateral. So it had to be an absolutely lock-tight case.
We did a huge amount of research for our new strategy around ‘Skills for life’, as this launched at same time as the rebrand. We did a lot of questioning which showed us there was a good level of support that we could point to and when we then carried out additional focus groups and testing with between 7,000 – 8,000 people, it became increasingly obvious, so we began presenting this back internally.
For us it was clear that the journey for the rebrand had to be based on making sure people understand who we are. The journey is ‘Awareness’, ‘Understanding’ and then ‘Engagement’.
The focus groups showed that people didn’t really understand who we are. They weren’t seeing a consistent image and were confusing us with other groups.
I always describe it as: if someone doesn’t understand who you are but you are then asking them to be a volunteer, or asking them to be a member, it’s a bit like asking someone to marry you on a first date – it’s like “I don’t have clue who you are!”.
So for us it was clear that the journey for the rebrand had to be based on making sure people understand who we are. The journey is ‘Awareness’, ‘Understanding’ and then ‘Engagement’.
Where did you start with the visual identity?
We looked at a number of different options but with the logo itself, it was pretty obvious that we would have to keep the fleur de lis in some shape or form as there was 38% instant recognition of the fleur de lis and its connection with Scouts.
The challenge was how we simplify it for a digital age. When shrunk down to 1cm square, how much of the detail does it lose? The new simplified version feels more digital, feels more like an icon, and at a small size it hardly loses anything at all.
But there were a few stumbling blocks along the way – first of all, it was the first brand we’d launched in the digital age, therefore people can do an awful lot of research and one of our members stumbled across the trademark registration for the new fleur de lis online. It was then shared without context and without other aspects of the brand, which understandably generated a lot of questions.
Some people believed we were replacing the World Scout badge which wasn’t actually going to change at all and one of the broadsheets unhelpfully ran an article implying we were going to ‘ditch’ the world badge, which wasn’t the case at all.
But we’ve been respectful of our heritage. We’ve re-imaged the mark for the digital age and we’ve preserved the heritage in the mark. ‘Be prepared’ is still our motto.
A bold new visual language
What really won the day for us in terms of the visual identity was using a really vibrant colour palette that captured the youthfulness and dynamism of Scouts. The really bold colours brought back the fun and injected a lot of life back into the identity. We used a simple Google font called ‘Nunito Sans’, which actually looks very plain to start with but when set against the bold colours is very striking.
We did consider using some extra devices like underlines and extra graphics like stripes and things, but we thought it would be better to keep the brand quite simple and flexible. It made it ideal for a strong tone of voice, so if you have a strong tone of voice working against that really simple bold context then suddenly it all starts to really work.
A new tone of voice
We developed a much more conversational and grounded tone of voice with a ‘you don’t have to be Bear Grylls to volunteer’ kind of vibe that has a nice bit of humour to it.
It felt very approachable, we use contractions like ‘can’t’ instead of ‘cannot’ so it feels more conversational and as a result, that distance that normally exists between the organisation and potential supporters crumbles away. It starts to feel very approachable and conversational, contemporary, digital, and suddenly our brand is so much more than just the logo.
The grand reveal
When it came to the official unveiling of the new identity, we knew it would be noisy on the day we launched so we knew we had to be ready to support our members. Shortly before the launch, we stumbled on something extraordinary: In Scouting for Boys, the book that started the movement, was Baden-Powell’s first ever drawing of the fleur de lis badge for Scouts. It bore a remarkable, almost uncanny resemblance to the simplified version used in the new identity.
We put this in a timeline to show people the evolution of the mark, and many of our members said, “oh, I can see how the new mark relates to his original idea.” This really helped in making the connection with our heritage.
We found that parents from BAME backgrounds are 44% more likely to volunteer and 69% more likely to send their children, and 14-18 year olds are at least a third more likely to get involved in Scouts.
How long did you give yourselves for the rebrand?
We gave ourselves about a year. We had a concrete deadline which was the launch of the new strategy, but a significant amount of that time was spent on engagement – having a lot of meetings with young people, parents, volunteers, the board, because actually, if you don’t have the engagement and unless you are bringing people with you, it would just be like “this has just popped out of nowhere!”. So a huge amount was about engagement.
We also formed a ‘Brand board’ made up of staff and volunteers, and a significant part of our work was in engaging the nations Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland because they have strong identities and it’s important to respect their local distinctiveness.
The challenge here was ‘how do we create a single brand that also provides that level of national distinctiveness?’. We engaged a lot of volunteers and staff from those nations to help us come up with ideas and the solution was colour, which sounds pretty obvious now.
So for Wales the primary colour in all the brand assets, the logo, typography etc. is red, and suddenly it feels entirely owned by Wales and yet it’s totally consistent with the new national Scout brand.
For Scotland the primary colour is blue and Northern Ireland have a choice of the green or purple. Purple is the primary colour for the rest of UK and overseas as it’s so synonymous with the Scout heritage.
Along with the time spent on engagement, a considerable amount of time was spent thinking around ‘Skills for life’ and rephrasing this – we did think about alternative phrases but in the end decided to keep it simple and focussed on the benefit. Only more recently have we started to articulate this in different ways in line with the tone of voice work. For example instead of using CV style words such as ‘initiative’, ‘leadership’, ‘independence’, we’re using more conversational phrases such as ‘thinking on your feet’ and using it in phrases like ‘thinking on your feet starts in a playground in Luton’. It feels very approachable and conversational and grounding it in a local location also really helps.
We could have done with more time on visuals, as I said it was quite a challenging road to get to the right solution and in fact our volunteers were the ones who said “if we’re going do this let’s make it futureproof and let’s be more radical than we thought we would be”.
And actually, you’re creating a lot of disruption with a rebrand so if it’s only for a marginal gain, people quite rightly question what the return on investment is.
What kind of metrics did you put in place to measure brand effectiveness?
We’ve looked across the UK and found that 90% of counties, about 50% of the districts and 2/3 of groups have updated their social media and website. We’ve since extended our transition deadline to the end of May 2021 to take pressure off groups who understandably are coping with other challenges stemming from COVID-19.
We also did some testing with audiences reactions to the new identity and found that people are more likely to volunteer based on the new identity, particularly amongst black and minority ethnic communities.
We found that parents from BAME backgrounds are 44% more likely to volunteer and 69% more likely to send their children, and 14-18 year olds are at least a third more likely to get involved in Scouts.
So from this we can then say to our Scout groups “If you do take time to update your materials there are positive gains to be had and recruitment should be easier”.
To help make it easier we created a brand centre so volunteers candownload their personalised logos and create all of their collateral and social assets at a touch of a button.
We released a guide saying ‘Update your branding in a lunchtime and still have time for a sandwich’. You can hop on to the brand centre, customise your sign and order it, download your local logo, update your Facebook and Twitter, order stickers for your minibus – all done in half an hour.
Were their any surprises from the rebrand?
There was more appetite than we thought for a new brand. It was almost a generation since the last major rebrand and it was the right time.
Developing the visual language was more difficult than we thought it would be and the outcome was braver than we expected.
It’s still early days to see the benefits, however our public trust, relevance and perception that we are open to have all risen this year. Feedback from the majority of the members and from the public has been largely positive and we’ve had great support from our hardworking volunteers.
How big a part does the Scout uniform play in influencing perceptions of the Scout brand and has this kept pace with what you have done with the rebrand?
The last major uniform update took place in 2001/02, directly after the last rebrand. There was an informal range called ‘i.SCOUT’ that appeared around 2008 which was across brightly coloured t-shirts. They sold in the tens of thousands because members needed something more informal, more vibrant and fun to wear as you can’t wear uniform all the time.
We’ve just done some consultation on what we wear and there are some interesting findings. For instance we found a lot of young people were turning up in uniform but then changing into t-shirts and Beavers and Cubs were getting too hot when they were running around in the jumpers – so we need to reflect on how we can create clothing that serves formal and informal uses and is also comfortable to wear.
We totally understand that our uniform forms part our brand and we’ll be listening closely to our members to find the right solution at the right time. The priority now however, is for us to support Groups and not instigate any further changes at this time.
Looking ahead, what challenges do you see for the Scouts and the brand?
Well the immediate challenge is to support our groups in most need – those in deprived areas in particular. When we have more stability it will be supporting those groups who haven’t yet switched to the new brand.
We’re also aware that we need to look at diversity. We already have over 6,000 Muslim members in the Scouts but we know we’ve got to reach into new and different communities.
We’re never going to be Nike – and we don’t necessarily need or want to be – but we’re proud of who we are in terms of helping young people get those skills for life and have a lot of fun in an accessible way.
We have to move with the times because as much as we can say we are part of the fabric of society we will just get left behind if we don’t. It’s vital because there is so much more choice for young people now than there was 20 years ago.
Going forward the priority is to support our volunteers with getting through these difficult times, supporting those who need help with the brand transition and making sure the public sees the benefit Scouts bring to society. And it’s important that all our members feel proud to belong to a great movement helping young people gain the skills they need to succeed.
