Stereo. Associates

Our “Building For Life” campaign is to anchored in a firm strategy. Citizens and journalists tend to focus on personal implications – with less consideration for the bigger picture. So we aimed at humanising the massive construction project by letting patients, relatives, doctors and nurses tell their story – what do they see as the main outcome and benefit?

We are building today, for all our tomorrows. For our children and our children’s children. The new hospitals are taking into account projections on both demographics and infrastructure. Technology is becoming miniaturised and intelligent. People live longer and closer together. Centralisation is a must and care has to become more efficient. This is no quick-fix, it’s a longterm change based on a longterm strategy.

STEREO shaped the new core story for the New Hospitals 2015-25 and created a campaign aiming to inform general public on two aspects. First of all we are building for life, for our lives and for future lives. Secondly, that many of the building sites were organising an Open House event in September 2017. Event that would serve as the perfect opportunity to get a hands-on experience. The campaign identity was designed to be more friendly than the regular county communication and included portraits, videos from five new hospitals, infographics and a new website collecting all the relevant information.

Photography by Tuala Hjarnø and videos by Kadaver.

To better communicate the essence of their brand promise, we expanded  it to the more emotional message We deliver – yesterday today and tomorrow’. By showing how their current steadfastness in the face of change is the result of more than a century of diligence, we also gave them the courage to carry that legacy into the future. When ‘we’ is given a series of faces, it becomes much easier to understand what individual employees are contributing. Clients too, will be introduced in this more casual way, to show explain that the new meaning of delivering is interconnected with the world of business in so many ways.

Collages of employees and clients were designed to decorate the new office interiors, mixing series of photos with quotes and stories. The visual expression is based on a pixelation of the fifth element of the their visual identity. By the breaking the box up into pixels, you get a more versatile tool that also signifies for the transformation process Postnord is in. The pixel pattern foil covering every glass surface were automatically generated using Processing, to show how the company utilises contemporary technologies. In the internet-of-things of the near future, their extensive infrastructure and consumer data will be their most valuable assets.

Photography by Tuala Hjarnø.

SAI works with discovery and testing of active substances in our future medicines. They rely on their factories delivering around the clock and their research centres functioning like clockwork. To do that employees must understand what it means to work at SAI and what the SAI way of working is. It’s a modern company that relies on flatter hierarchies than their competitors.

Accepting responsibility and fulfilling potential was the message we wanted to convey with the employer branding campaign we created for SAI on the back of redefining their brand strategy. “Make it better together” is STEREO’s definition of the SAI way, and the foundation for igniting the potential of the company, its employees and the society around it’s many locations.

Together with photographer by Kristine Funch, STEREO visited Hyderabad, Bidar and Pune to meet the people behind SAI at all levels – from the factory staff, to laboratory scientists, to office clerks working with anything from HR to sales to mid-level management. By showing how these people are fulfilling their own potential, and helping to move the company in the right direction, it suddenly became easier for everyone to understand that we are all working as a team.

The staff at HQ are now daily looking at employees from around the country, who are all doing their part in making SAI better. The result of the campaign is a set of large portraits and quotes covering the walls of the new head office in Hyderabad. The idea was also to extend the campaign to their intranet. We are currently working with SAI to implement change communication in signage and print form throughout the company.

Move Mountains is a new brand that has become popular among Scandinavian retailers. To capitalise on the popularity, they were in need of updating their design to be bolder and more appealing in the eyes of retailers.

With the intention of expanding their range from hiking shoes to casual shoes and outerwear to suit everyone – the new brand is built on accessibility and durability. The simplicity and charm of outdoor life coupled with a spartan design inspired by Scandinavian tradition is the core of Move Mountains.

“Fit for every day” is expressed not only by the communication, but the whole design system. It is easily adaptable to different formats, materials and products – something that was key for the client. STEREO developed a brand strategy for Move Mountains, that resulted in a new visual identity. The concept included product branding, packaging guidelines, a naming system and digital ideas for websites and social media.

One of Carlsberg’s business opportunities is the exponentially growing craft category. While the overall market for beer is shrinking, people crave new exciting products. Carlsberg are well poised to tap into a storytelling based on tradition and local heritage, something that is emblematic of most crafted products. Beer could become as much of a premium product as vintage wine has been historically. It’s all about finding the right partners, personalities and compelling stories – and the possibilities are endless.

This has led us to a deep expertise in craft branding and new categories of alcoholic beverages, based on market research and interviews. STEREO performs qualitative research both in the field and behind the desk . Mapping and analysis enable us to produce accurate trend forecasts.

Building on focussed research, we quickly prototype concepts and work in close collaboration with our client to present a plethora of viable scenarios. Some day, we hope to be able to tell you more.

Just Books, ironically, offers much more than your regular library. In many places in Bengaluru it is the only place for the community to come together to find and share knowledge. The new community centres may include cafés, lecture rooms and kids areas – offering lending of books, film and music; workshops; lectures; and a place to relax.

The visual identity of Just Books was created to celebrate the format of the book and the diversity and wealth of the stories and knowledge contained within. The identity is scalable both in breadth (as new sub brands are developed) and expression (from corporate to specific offerings).

Based on research on the global brand space of e-books, audiobooks and reading tablets, STEREO developed the new brand promise Discover & Share. Discovering new worlds has always been the reason for picking up a new book, but as a part of Just Books, people also get a platform for sharing and learning from each others discoveries.

Café Thulp! is an established brand in Bengaluru, with a visual identity inspired by American comics. To make them look more street smart and appealing among the IT office workers milling about at lunch time, we paired the American fast food aesthetic with a more refined typographic expression.

This harsh juxtaposition also comes across in communication, which blends the factual with the absurd using blunt office humour (actually inspired by The Office series). STEREO did the naming and a mini identity for the new street stalls that will be opening soon.

The project included solutions for signage, packaging, user experience, uniforms and spatial. As such, this is a fine example of how we approach brand experience projects within neatly defined contexts. The result is a more international, friendly and accessible version of Thulp!, that takes the entire user journey into account.

What started as a strategy and naming process, has grown into a steady relationship that has so far resulted in a website for CORO and their members (developed together with AAFF) and other branded materials. We have helped make the somewhat complex story about Triple Helix cooperation and social innovation relevant and attractive.

In 2017, CORO are organising what will be an annual COconference for the first time, and STEREO are responsible for the name and visual expression of the event.

Read more on COconference.

Having the created the original campaign “Hvad er problemet?” (What’s the problem?) at another agency, Roskilde University or RUC, approached us to create a follow-up campaign. The result was a somewhat more far-reaching effort, that expanded on the idea of problem-based learning, so emblematic of the Roskilde institution. Because RUC is all about working to solve real problems in the real world – as opposed to the abstraction of mathematics and traditional academics – you could say that RUC is the university of the real. What do you really want to do?

That became the name of the new campaign (“Hvad vil du i virkeligheden?”) and we set about portraying both bachelor and masters students to find out what problems out there in the world, they really wanted to solve. For each student, a small universe was created, including a portrait in a setting connected to their chosen problem as well still lifes of objects that symbolised it, according to themselves.

A campaign website was designed by us, and together with digital agency Kadaver a social media plan was set up to share the individual stories, in the students’ own words. The goal was to create a sympathetic relation between prospective students and these role models or ambassadors they could look up to. Rather than being perfect students, these people were just like you and me, facing more problems than they could solve. But that is the reality of RUC, and the only way to push innovation forward.

The 2016 campaign photos were taken by Lasse Dearman.

Crescent University is situated just outside Chennai and is equipped with an extensive lush and calm campus, with modern facilities. It has a history as a technical college, originally devoted to muslim youths, because the self-made founder was devoted to giving back to kids of the same modest origins that he himself came from. Today, the university’s mission is to find and feed that same flame of entrepreneurship among young people of all backgrounds.

To match their highly contemporary approach to problem based teaching, the visual identity had to reach the same level of boldness and modernity that international competitors embody. STEREO were tasked with a complete rebranding of the university, that started with advising them on the name of the university itself. From there, the logo was redesigned and we introduced new colours and typography.

STEREO has given them a new photo style and have done the first round of photography for their future image bank – together with photographer Claus Praeger-Jahnsen. These will be used on the new website, for which we have done the design, information architecture and user experience.

The most radical change has been the introduction of a new communication concept, that builds on the brand promise “Reimagine Possibilities”. By establishing the acronym CU as an active element in communication, we have created an engine that can encompass the full range of possibilities studying at Crescent offers. CU in business, CU in innovation, CU in court, CU in Chennai.

Coupled with the new palette, the new corporate font and its matching icon set — Crescent have all the tools needed to create engaging content. Which is an ongoing project for STEREO, that has only just begun. We look forward to showing you more.

Natural Sciences is not just about Newton and Pascal anymore – it’s about Julian Assange and Elon Musk. To help young people associate the burning platform of today’s challenges with school, we created a campaign based on big questions: How do we understand the threat of nation-sponsored hacking? How do we prevent travellers from ruining the environment? These are the type of questions students at HTX Roskilde are now asked.

The technical highschool in Denmark offers a contemporary take on everything from programming to biomedicine. To help bring more teenagers into the HTX programme (and eventually on to study science at university) STEREO developed a campaign called ”We ask the questions, we the create solutions” , which coupled tricky questions from a range of subjects with photographs of the tools we have to create new solutions.

The concept is perfectly suited for student co-creation and social sharing, as they ask their own questions and imagine their own tools. In this way, STEREO has helped create a more diverse and modern image of the Roskilde school. It is also the first step towards establishing the school as an individual brand, after a long association with the city’s technical college RTS. The new campaign identity builds on a simple and flexible system that can eventually be developed into a complete brand.