West Beach Parks

Branding a world-class holiday, sport and recreation precinct.

The Brief

A new name, brand and marketing strategy for SA's largest holiday, sporting and recreation park.

South Australia’s largest holiday, sporting and recreation park, Adelaide Shores, came to Fuller wanting a “back to basics” understanding of its brand. A strategic plan developed in 2016 had identified the need for a new integrated vision that better reflected the diverse nature of the precinct.

The brief included development of a new name that reflected Adelaide Shores’ diverse offering of a world class holiday park, sporting fields and adventure activities in the one location and a marketing strategy to launch and drive engagement with the new brand.

Fuller was engaged by Adelaide Shores in 2017 to carry out brand research and the development of a new brand and marketing strategy, to help it realise its vision: “to become a world-class tourism, sport and recreation precinct”.


 

Strategy

A strategy-first approach.

Fuller undertook 12 months of research including extensive customer interviews, internal focus groups and surveys.

The process included:

  • One on one interviews with senior executive team and key tenants
  • Informal catch ups/focus groups with customer facing staff over a BBQ lunch
  • A workshop with 30 key industry stakeholders.

The research found that even though the Adelaide Shores name had been in place since the 1990s, common usage still referred to it as West Beach Caravan Park.

The insight was that there was a lot of brand equity in the destination name, West Beach, that wasn’t being leveraged.

The research also found that the name Adelaide was misleading to interstate visitors – there was confusion between the Adelaide CBD and a beach destination and that the term “shores” had lost its point of difference.

Fuller’s brand strategy recommended that West Beach be utilised in the new brand name as it resonated with the many thousands of regular intra-state and interstate visitors more strongly than Adelaide Shores.

“Parks” was added as a mechanism to describe the organisation’s fully integrated offer – from the Big4 Holiday Park and Resort for holiday-makers to the baseball, football and diamond sports parks to the golf, mini-golf and adventure park as well as the marina.

In June 2018 a new name was launched – West Beach Parks.

The new brand name was combined with the tagline: come to life, which was used as the creative idea behind the launch campaign.

The launch campaign aimed to create awareness of and engagement with the new brand amongst West Beach Parks’ diverse range of target audiences: both external (current and future visitors as well as stakeholders such as local government, State Government) and internal (lessees, tenants and staff).

Results

The 12 month project culminated in the launch of the new brand.

West Beach Parks was launched to internal stakeholders and industry peers as well as staff, in July 2018.

Fuller undertook a series of staff presentations and engaged staff in the change process, using them as “model talent” for the “come to life” campaign videos and photo shoots.

We also developed a memento of the change – a colourful beach towel with the new brand – that was presented to all staff at the official launch.

New signage, uniforms, vehicle branding and a new website were developed in time for the launch along with a marketing campaign using digital advertising, content marketing via social media and print, radio and outdoor advertising.

Since the West Beach Parks brand was launched its website experienced 40% year-on-year growth in sales and the precinct’s key commercial businesses BIG4 West Beach Parks and West Beach Parks Resort have met budget.