BACKGROUND
ESCRS commissioned Principle to help them revisit their brand identity, rethink its divisional brands and to ensure its relevance in a dynamic surgical field.
The ESCRS is Europe’s leading organisation for cataract and refractive surgeons and is at the forefront of developments in anterior segment (eye) surgery.
Since 1991, the society has grown to over 7,500 members from almost 130 countries worldwide where it acts as a forum for discussion and learning, ensuring the sharing of global surgical expertise. It delivers a wide range of resources and services to its members.
BRAND STRATEGY – KNOWLEDGE AT WORK
This was a key communication objective for the new brand – How do we engage a membership in all the benefits of being a member beyond Congress?
ESCRS was already a success, particularly its annual congress which is attended by 10 to 15,000 delegates each year. One challenge for the Society was that with all the success at congress was not translating into an active daily membership and its current identity was not in keeping up with their ambitions to change that dynamic.
In workshop with the leadership team, we discovered a goldmine of educational and professional services that ESCRS members already had ready access to. These resources were available globally and across a number of mediums and we were looking to build that into our brand.
BRAND IDENTITY – BELONG TO SOMETHING…
To bring order to the wide range of member services we knew that we needed develop a clear architecture of the brand to house them.
The true benefit of membership is that shared knowledge works and is at work when we engage with each other. Therefore with both the visual and verbal brand we set about creating a simplified message about community, about shared learning and its benefits – where knowledge is transferred between consultants and shared with the student with an ultimate aim to enhance the value and deepen the impact of cataract and refractive surgery for members, society and of course, patients.
For the brand mark, the complexity of the human eye was simplified to retinal lines, denoting a coming together and a global community in all things ocular. We created a broad palette that allowed for a number of sub-brands that could fit within the same family.
We worked closely with their inhouse designers, supplying their team with wide range of templates and direction that allowed them to create inspiring material in print and digital formats.
The new ESCRS brand launched to nearly 10,000 delegates at their annual congress in Barcelona in 2015 but we’re not finished as each year we have the added enjoyment of interpreting the brand for their flagship Annual Congress, wherever it finds itself…Lisbon, Paris and next year, Amsterdam