The Royal Parks

Rebranding the world’s most famous parks

Brand strategy
Brand identity
Brand campaign
Brand architecture
Brand assets
Brand guidelines
Brand activation
Signage and wayfinding
Art direction
Tone of voice

Client

The Royal Parks is the charity dedicated to caring for the most famous collection of urban parks in the world. They provide free access to London’s beautiful, natural and historic green spaces, to help improve everyone’s quality of life and wellbeing by protecting and sustainably managing 5,000 acres of diverse parkland. But as a charity they have to do all this from the funds they raise.

Brief

Research suggested many audiences perceived The Royal Parks as being elitist, over authoritarian, or not necessarily for everyone to enjoy. The Royal Parks wanted to help evolve their brand, to increase public awareness of their charitable status, create a warmer and more inviting brand experience, and provide more opportunities for the organisation to move into new areas to raise funding.

Solution

Rose evolved The Royal Parks brand strategy and positioning, to help the organisation improve its connection with visitors and encourage new audiences to feel welcome within the parks. Rose also simplified and streamlined the brand architecture to build greater brand recognition of The Royal Parks brand. From the refreshed brand strategy, Rose created The Royal Parks brand identity, evolving and improving the elements to create a timeless, practical solution that is now fit for purpose across digital and mobile applications.

To improve legibility and become more friendly, Rose designed The Royal Parks signage to be simpler and more practical, using colours that stand out against the natural palette of greens within the parks, with black information to aid visibility and accessibility. On completion of the evolved brand identity, Rose created The Royal Parks brand guidelines and templates for the internal team and external design agencies to use and follow for all on-going implementation of the brand across the many different areas of the organisation.

Result

In helping The Royal Parks define their new brand strategy, we helped transform their brand identity to become measurably warmer, more welcoming and contemporary. Within the first year of us repositioning The Royal Parks brand and creating the brand identity, they saw an increase in visitors to all of their parks; 20,000 people a week engaged in sports and physical activities; 3 million attended events in the parks and 34,000 participated in learning activities. The brand evolution also has also helped the charity’s revenue streams with; 58% increase in Charitable Activities, 21% increase in Trading Activities, 40% increase in Events, and 73% increase in Catering Concessions¹.

¹ The Royal Parks Annual Review and Accounts 2022–2023

Heather Carr
Head of Brand and IP
The Royal Parks

‘As a new charity (although the history of The Royal Parks dates back some 500 years) we needed to evolve our brand identity in order to respect our unique history in the heart of London, champion our biodiversity, and be warm and welcoming to everyone.

We asked Rose to help us with this important piece of work, confident in their wealth of experience with similar projects and organisations over many years. They have worked hard to understand what is important to us and help rationalise our brand portfolio, bringing clarity to our brand strategy which became the creative springboard for their brand identity development for us. We are delighted to see their work roll out across our parks.’