Sockeye was selected as agency of record to clarify and align OHSU’s master brand while elevating its unique sub-brands. Strategic aspirations included building awareness and strengthening perceptions, developing the human story, and creating connection across the institution. Other goals included driving clinical business, increasing understanding of OHSU's role in the region and in the national conversation.
This brand campaign work has been followed by individual campaigns for key OHSU sub-brands such as Doernbecher, Knight Cancer and Cardiovascular and The Brain Institute. These sub-brands are being integrated with the overarching OHSU Brand campaign to ensure consistency across the different campaigns and to maximize impact through media placement and ROI.
With Metro as our client, Sockeye was charged with creating a municipal website that citizens would be inspired to use. No mean feat, particularly as we had never seen one ourselves. Well-designed, attractive city websites are like Bigfoot: they’re elusive, and rumored not to exist at all.
Metro is so unique and diverse that any templating was out of the question. So, Sockeye deployed highly skilled development and creative teams. Their work yielded a site that is smart, simple to use, and shows the diversity of Metro’s programs and purviews.
By working from the perspective of the user and honoring the stakeholder engagement findings, Metro now has a site where, among other things, you can book a park for your wedding, recycle paint, and learn that, as a resident, you actually own the cemeteries. Success!
Also with Metro as our client, we developed a site that would honor the animals as much as our great Oregon Zoo itself does. We worked with our development team to develop a custom Drupal slideshow to communicate the grandeur of the zoo through imagery. The result? Majestic portraiture of the zoo’s inhabitants as a backdrop for planning a visit, becoming a member, learning about program opportunities for youth, or wildlife preservation efforts.
Whether onsite or online, the animals are always front and center at the zoo. This direction, combined with unified messaging and clear paths for engagement produced a site works for the zoo, and not the other way around.
When Metro’s (artist formerly known as) Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA) came to us, there was confusion surrounding their offerings. The center included five theater venues, in three locations with six names—all owned by the citizens of Portland. But no one understood any of this.
Sockeye was hired to redesign the PCPA logo, but we soon realized there was more to the task than that. We conducted a series of stakeholder meetings with theater companies, Metro elected officials, union leaders, artists and volunteers. And we discovered that the greater PCPA brand was less important, but that the names of the individual theaters were the key—the Schnitzer, the Keller… and so on. In the process of developing the creative brief, we identified an objective to be for taxpayers to support the venue should there be a bond measure at some point. A challenge is that very few taxpayers knew that these venues were theirs.
And so we branded. The five theaters are now part of a brand system, Portland’5 Centers for the Arts.
When Oregon’s largest urban university engaged Sockeye to redesign its logo, initial stakeholder work revealed there were significant challenges to be addressed. The institution was entrenched in an outdated brand and reputation, which manifested in a lack of internal voice, and low self esteem. Clearly this work was about more than a logo.
We knew the way to elevate the conversation around PSU and capture Oregon’s attention was by building confidence in order to align internal and external brands. Through multiple stakeholder engagement sessions, we helped the client understand their story by cracking open their voice, resulting in a shift of culture to complement, rather than challenge, the mindset of academia. This enormous shift in paradigm led to a wholesale rebrand, a redesign of the university website and microsites, and ultimately, a revitalization of an institution whose voice finally lived up to its stature.
