Designing a new brand for an evolving water district
About this project
Client
Western Water
Services
Branding
The opportunity
Over the past four years, Western Water has been on a quest to reinvest itself and earn the highest honor a public agency could obtain—trust from its more than one million customers and stakeholders.
Work began in earnest after a mishandled water rate increase in 2017 dealt a massive blow to the district’s public perception. Faced with record-low customer satisfaction numbers and a board of directors eager to change public sentiment, the leadership team developed and deployed a comprehensive strategic communications plan aimed at systemically changing the organization’s culture and customer experience.
The board unanimously adopted the plan in April 2019, which included guiding principles; a target audience profile; master narrative; key message platform; defined goals and objectives; tactical recommendations; and success metrics. Western Water has been tenaciously implementing the plan with an unwavering commitment to enhance stakeholder trust.
One of the plan’s recommendations was to visually signal positive changes with a refreshed brand identity once the effort had taken root. In 2022, that effort came to fruition with the development and launch of a new brand for the agency including an overhaul to the logo and visual system, the adoption of a new nomenclature (Western Water), and a fresh tagline reflecting its customer-inspired direction.
The approach
A five-phase process was used to develop the new brand:
Conduct Research
Develop Strategy
Design Identity
Create Touchpoints
Manage Assets and Rollout
The first step included a deep dive of research including a communications audit, competitive analysis, statistically significant and organic surveys, and internal and external focus groups. The team also conducted a competitive analysis and facilitated a visual preferences workshop with an internal focus group and the board of directors.
With research complete, the comprehensive findings and analysis report was presented along with a proposed strategy. Once the direction was approved, the JPW creative team kicked into high gear.
Dozens of ideas were explored before focusing in on final concepts. Throughout this part of the process, Western Water’s project staff and consultant team worked as integrated partners to ensure that the logo design authentically reflected the district’s reality and future aspirations.
Using feedback from those sessions, three final concepts were advanced to a larger, diverse employee brand ambassador team to achieve consensus on one final recommended concept.
The solution
Thanks to a data-driven approach coupled with an integrated, diverse project team, continual strategy adjustments and several Board workshops, the new brand earned board approval in October 2022.
The final creative concept for Western Water’s new brand is a bold and modern statement to reflect the organization as a progressive, forward-thinking regional leader. It uses the impact of color, typography and negative space to convey the agency’s core service mission and focuses on the words “Western Water.”
The icon is comprised of two overlapping Ws to represent the initial caps of Western Water. It then leverages the negative space in the W to create a water drop. The typography used in the tagline is purposefully italicized to symbolize forward movement and repeats the sharp angles of the icon.
Using color theory, color selection was driven by Western Water’s core values. The primary W is a true navy color—a nod to the agency’s primary service mission (water delivery). This primary color conveys reliability and relatability. The subtle gradient of the second W not only represents the water cycle (drinking, wastewater and recycled water), but also provides the illusion of fluid movement like water, almost giving the impression of light reflecting off a pool.
Once the final logo was approved, the creative team got to work building several key pieces of collateral in anticipation of the launch. A key component was the development of an interactive brand toolkit that provides staff access to working assets making the switch to the new brand easier. The toolkit includes a brand style guide and amplifies it with working files like letterhead, envelopes, business cards, eSignatures, Zoom backgrounds, PowerPoint templates and more.
By conducting a skillful rebrand anchored in multiple strategies outlined in Western Water’s strategic communications plan, the organization has moved from stale, stagnant and disconnected to letting its true values and aspirations shine through.
Western Water’s successful rebrand has served as the intended punctuation to the much larger strategic shift within the organization. The new look more accurately reflects Western Water as a cutting-edge organization that’s breaking ground to solve some of the region and state’s biggest water challenges while ensuring a sustainable future for generations to come.