Natural History Museum

Developing a nocturnal destination brand

Campaign iden
Campaign assets
Brand campaign
Campaign activation
Art direction
Tone of voice

Client

The Natural History Museum is one of the world’s leading visitor attractions and science research centres, with over 80 million objects and specimens from natural history, spanning more than 4.5 billion years.

Brief

The museum hosts a series of evening events for adults – entitled ‘After Hours’ – on the last Friday of each month. With a renewed focus on developing their 18-35 audiences, The Natural History Museum asked Rose to redesign the campaign identity for After Hours, to raise awareness of their events, attract audiences and increase ticket sales. The Natural History Museum wanted to bring together all their current and future evening events under an umbrella identity that would appeal to “contemporary-cultured” and “learned-liberal” audience segments, whilst supporting the Museum’s position of authenticity in the natural world. The museum wanted Rose to use their masterbrand identity assets, but create a recognisable campaign identity for After Hours that reflected the uniqueness of their evening events, whilst conveying the diverse range of experiences on offer.

Solution

Given the clear increase in cultural institutions and visitor attractions opening their doors in the evenings to host more events and audiences, Rose felt it was essential to create a visual identity that could help After Hours standout in a highly competitive marketplace. To visually reflect the campaign name, Rose proposed a palette of electric neon colours against black backdrops, to maximise visibility and create differentiation for each event, whilst providing a recognisable visual language. To reflect the beautiful and eclectic nature of the museum and connect with the cultured audiences they were looking to attract, Rose commissioned a series of distinctive collage illustrations for each event, to highlight the unique, nocturnal experiences on offer.

Result

Further to our rebranding of ‘After Hours’ in 2016, the Natural History Museum expanded its Lates programme, regularly selling-out events and broadening both audience reach and diversification, by providing popular, revenue-driven social gatherings. The success of the programme over the following 2 years, contributed to the museum increasing overall visitor figures by 17.86% from 2017 to 2018.¹

¹alva.org.uk and Natural History Museum Annual Report and Accounts