Southern Water

the Let's Talk Water campaign

How do you engage with the community to talk about their water, and the fundamental role it plays in their daily lives?

Insight:

Southern Water lives and breathes its community’s water supply so its customers can go freely about their daily lives enjoying safe and refreshing water. Each day they supply 524 million litres of drinking water from 89 water treatment works along 13,793 kilometres of water mains to its customers’ taps. It is a huge undertaking, and Southern Water was keen to reach out to its customers to see if it’s getting it right.

The company knows that the future holds lots of opportunities, particularly around the role in which it can support its customers, communities and local economy. This is why Southern Water is updating its long-term strategy to make sure its services respond to the needs of the future. ‘Let’s Talk Water’ is the campaign name for starting the conversation with its customers, to be able to gather thoughts and to hear views on how best it can work for customers and make the most of future opportunities.

Our approach:

Starting with the campaign brand, we created a friendly and approachable logo to appear on all the ‘Let’s Talk Water’ collateral. The design is soft and curvy with fluidity like water and the font is playful to relate to the conversational tone with speech marks made from water drops. The campaign needed to be accessible to all, so multiple illustrations and info-graphics were required which were sympathetically designed and complement the Southern Water house style.

Once we had created the ‘Let’s Talk Water’ suite of campaign graphics, we designed and produced the 24-page supporting brochure which would be both mailed and downloaded by Southern Water’s customer base. The brochure explains the company’s journey to the year 2045; outlining the development strategy and future opportunities. The tone of the publication is naturally conversational, outlines the proposed plans and invites customers and stakeholders to contribute and ‘talk water’ via the campaign publication and website. Additionally in support of the brochure, we created a variety of campaign advertisements serving both off and online media.