Our Work

| Seattle Arts & Lectures

 

Challenge

Since language is, after all, the primordial and principal stuff of cognition and culture, it should come as no surprise that an organization whose mission it is to celebrate language itself might struggle at times to neatly define its meaning and value through a consistent, compelling brand strategy and identity. For over 20 years, SAL had brought the Seattle area community together, creating rich experiences by presenting the world’s most creative thinkers, and programs taught by the area’s most dynamic writers and teachers. SAL had provided venues where the area community connected in the transformative power of the imagination – in the auditorium and the classroom – in the spirit of creating a more inspired, curious, and engaged community.

 

Since its inception, however, SAL's audience had been predominately (though not exclusively) white, well-educated, well off, women. Over the course of just two decades, the Seattle area had seen phenomenal economic growth and seismic shifts in its demographic composition. SAL leadership wanted to engage with the broadest possible range of bright, curious people of all ages and backgrounds in the region who enjoy language, literature, ideas, and learning through its increasingly varied and exploratory programming. SAL's original branding had long since ceased to serve this goal, and was clearly failing to connect with the area's younger and demographically diverse community. The challenge of the new identity system was thus to retain and reenergize SAL's current audiences, to better cross-pollinate the educational and public programs, and to rapidly expand both of these audiences.

 

Solution

A careful, highly collaborative research phase, consisting of a series of in-depth interviews, creative exercises, and facilitated group sessions culminated in the organization’s first fully articulated brand positioning and messaging framework. This living document spelled out SAL’s mission and brand strategy in a way that was both empowering to the organization’s management and staff, and which directed the subsequent development of a vital new visual identity system and a complete transformation of all digital and collateral marketing communications media.

The new brand positioning and visual identity make clear that the organization is not simply about ethereal ideas and disembodied language. SAL is also a felt, “visceral” experience. SAL is a focused, intensification of the already highly charged, uniquely human intersection of the physical world and virtual realm of metaphor and memory. SAL is not (simply) a well-turned phrase or an aesthetic abstraction. It is about the interaction between a writer and her readers, between individuals sitting side by side in an audience, between teachers and students learning about themselves and one another in often intimate exchanges of personal meanings and experiences. SAL is fresh meaning on the tips of our tongues.

 

Though the digital dimension of the program is now in development, early responses to the new event, advertising and marketing media have already been extremely positive. Events have been filled to overflowing. Courses have been sold out. And, beyond the numbers, members of SAL management and the board of directors have been energized by the excitement and steady flow of praise generated by the new brand and all-new media.