The Drumfork Community Centre, which has been at the heart of the Royal Navy family community in Helensburgh for over 60 years, was completely refurbished and rebranded thanks to LIBOR funding and an improvement grant from the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity (RNRMC) and a number of partners responding to its fundraising appeal, including Greenwich Hospital, The MacRobert Trust and the Gosling Foundation.
This rebrand formed part of a complete refurbishment of Drumfork Community Centre. In the early 1960s a families’ centre was opened to coincide with the arrival of the Polaris nuclear deterrent boats at Faslane. Whist the submarine fleet has been upgraded, the families’ centre, and its brand imagery, remained much as when it first opened and was in a decaying and deeply unattractive state.
With the decision to move the Royal Navy’s entire submarine fleet to Faslane, including 43 Commando RM, the number of family members in and around the base was set to grow to over 8,000. The RNRMC recognised the need to deliver much needed support to families by completely refurbishing the Centre, updating its IT capability, and putting in a nursery facility. This refurbishment needed a new brand image, representative of the purpose of the Centre.
Lamerton Creative employed our customer-centric approach to brand development which involved working closely with the Drumfork team, getting under the skin of the repositioning brand and what the message would mean to navy families.
Our process included:
We created brand imagery and offered colourways that aligned to the purpose of providing users with support, love, and a feeling of well-being. The various colours and shapes demonstrate each part as a person or an age or a group. These shapes and colours come together in one place to create a heart representing that users of Drumfork are all valued and so consider themselves part of the centre, the community, and Helensburgh.
The shape carries the rationale of:
The new brand is confident and vibrant and certainly not one that will sit back and wait to be seen. The huge range of colours (39 in all) can be drawn on for individualising events, rooms, doors, flyers and marketing materials. The possibilities are endless.
The Royal Navy experiences more family separation than the other two branches of the Armed Forces. Over the twelve or so years it has been supporting the wider naval family, the RNRMC has come to better understand what distinguishes those who are most able to cope with and the demands being made on those who serve and their family members: namely strong and supportive naval communities.
The physical manifestation of its philosophy to play its part in building community resilience is no better demonstrated than in at Drumfork Community Centre where the refurbishment, and heart-felt supporting rebrand, are the RNRMC’s biggest demonstration to date of putting the weight of its fundraising efforts behind its beneficiaries.