Festival Branding – Exhaustive Review

What is festival branding?

DIfferentiation of your event, forming its identity, determining key features that fascinate people, understanding the potential audience and how to cater to their taste symbolises branding for festival. The characterising activities are done by experienced professionals in the sphere that simultaneously possess extensive knowledge of creative approaches, have strategic thinking and are proficient at technological tools.

Originative tools that you’ll be familiar with having read the next passages of our outline will help raise your event on a few levels up by the means of forming distinctive persona with the implementation of all-encompassing strategies, cross-platform promotion and state-of-art visuals, covering not only appealing frontage but working deeply, leaving no stone unturned in the matter of its meaning and purpose.

UK festival branding is aimed at enhancing the recognition of the event you’re going to arrange, spreading the world about it through different platforms, tapping into the potential guests’ emotions before the main day comes and establishing the reputation so in the future you could return with a new program!

Key elements of effective branding for the festival

The establishment of festival identity requires defining essential parts of visual, verbal and experiential identities that fit with each other and is the cause of emotional response and long-lasting impressions. Study closely these components with mentioning some remarkable cases:

1. Consistent imagery design – appealing visual materials is the most significant part of festival branding. In combination with the others you’ll find further, knock together a picture that makes people wonder about what’s going to happen there.

   The unified imagery consists of designing logos that will be attached to the tickets, merchandise and other attributes, choosing colour palette and typography, painting illustrations and special elements that will accurately characterise your concept. One of the British festivals, End of the Road is a great example of building the ambience with the best-suited visuals.

2. Strategy creation and positioning – as it’s with establishing a business, launching effective festival revamp requires thorough attention to implementing a strategy. The first phase of it may be auditing of your current situation, analysing previous gatherings if there were such and defining the main points of exclusivity of the future launch.

   Other than that, ascertaining the audience that will benefit the most from your event and deciding the missions. This element is like a glue that will help keep all the components together and be harmonious as it was with the Green Man Festival that is centred on nature and music.

3. All-encompassing messaging – the values of your event must be put into words since they are the most effective way to communicate. The completeness of verbal identity for a festival incorporates an embracing story creation that might emphasise the origin of the event or some unique features and content creation for social media.

   With the SXSW slogan “Tomorrow happens here” or with Lollapalloza’s “Music is Our DNA” we quickly understand the meaning of the gathering and choosing appropriate messages will facilitate the undertaking of appealing to the right audience.

4. Experiential lures – unforgettable experiences are something that you need to keep in mind whether doing music festival branding, preparing cooking events or a meeting for people to share their inspiration like it’s done during TEDx sessions. Nowadays to stand out of the crowd is not enough just provide the minimum.

   Setting the beneficial conditions might require some specific advancements to the program like master-classes. Being related to the music industry, you could offer your attendees short lessons or call local artists to prepare installations. For a food festival, cooking classes or a competition can help capture more attention. During attending The Lost Village Festival in the UK, people experience an exceptional lure and fully immerse themselves in the atmosphere.

5. Location image – venue and festival branding is formed for making the location you choose appropriate for having the name day. It’s supposed to take care of designing exterior – placement of the stage, probable shops or installations, and putting wayfindings and merchandise stands.

   Not only physical elements matter. Through the period of the place determination and advancement, should be considered the subjects of the scenery, the overall atmosphere, depending on the mood you want to maintain – playful, serious or carefree. The Le Guess Who Festival in the Netherlands is a great example of sync between the historical part of the city and music.

6. Brand book – supporting a certain image, securing cumulative effect of the promotional campaign and sticking to the tasks of your gathering, formulating a guide book is the perfect method not to lose sight of important fundamentals.

The guide might include the sections that encompass identity design with the rules of using typography, colours, logos and other elements – such as posters, mood boards. Additionally, it can contain the information of stationary and merchandise that align with the main idea, details about digital branding – advertising on social media and website design and development.

The impact of festival branding design on ticket sales

Referring to the influence of originative measures on sales, we can’t name one exact reason why they are going to rise – simply because they are more factors than one. In fact, the variety of determinants that are blended together, ensure the results you expect for and the most important ones we gave a thought to in our overview:

When the image is complete and well aligned, the event evokes curiosity and anticipation.

Implementation of festival branding ideas, following trends that make the gathering up to date, and working carefully on portraying the celebration on social media will grab more attention than without it.

The fleur of exclusivity increases intrigue. Through the differentiation and uncovering unique features of the event, it obtaines its noteworthy and identifying particulars that are peculiar only to your festival, making it special and worth attending. Defining a unique selling proposition and turning it into visuals and words is a solution when you look for ways of advancing ticket sales and be notable in the wide selection of competitors.

Properly thought-out design with empowered digital tools will reach more people. No modern film festival branding won’t go well without good online representation. It includes promoting festivals through different digital platforms that we’ll explore more closely in the next part of our summary and the opportunity to buy tickets online. Every of these parts should be designed distinctively and showcase the worth of the event.

Uniformity and authenticity of the design secure trustworthiness. Whether you launch a festival to hold it every year or it’s a solo event, a major thing to take care of is how people perceive your event and if they believe in the variety of your offerings that you provide since visiting festivals means paying in advance. It might be that you came up with a fascinating and long awaited idea, so it should be portrayed properly.

Effective targeting reinforces the efforts. In the matter of promoting your event for certain categories of people that are usually classified during strategy formulation while conducting UK festival branding, it’s important to take into consideration not only location but age, preferences of your potential attendees and put efforts into coming up with ideas that will work particularly well with your audience.

The last but not least is ensuring smooth presales far from the date of the event. Typically, it takes months if not years to launch a successful festival that will be sold-out and selling tickets on the starting point is a tough quest, especially if it comes to novelties people have never heard before. That’s when the proper differentiation takes its place in order to set a desirable image in attendees’ minds and inspire them visiting the event you’re preparing for them.

Nailong carrying out of individualising revamp of your great gathering necessitate a bit of patience and time to get up to speed, so if you have in mind to launch something exceptional and iconic, don’t postpone the preparation to the later time because creative branding is the most effective in the long run and needs taking a while to get going and get the word out.

How to leverage social media for best festival branding?

There’s no need to invent the wheel and look for methods that will help spread awareness of your event when social media has been already created. Having answered these questions practically, you will get good instruments for presentation:

What hashtags do you use?

The power of social media is in their instruments and algorithms that bring brands to people that need them, with implementing proper approaches. Choosing the right tags that are unique and can be used to give the algorithms a hint what your content is about and showing it to the right audience sooner.

Looking for #BurningMan #Coachella you’ll find a bunch of publishing on TikTok or Instagram. Even simply guessing some tags that people might be interested in you’ll get results faster than just publishing posts. However, relying on the help of professionals who have already explored every avenue and perfectly understand the rules is much more beneficial.

Are your visuals appealing and consistent?

Even if you invest a lot of money in promoting your cuisine event without food festival branding it won’t be as efficient as it could be with a well-designed imagery. When the illustrations are structured, with elements settled on the proper spots, with colours that complement the concept, it won’t be difficult to turn people’s eyes to your celebration.

Any possible oddities turn people blind to the events since failing in preparation cast a shadow over the probable atmosphere. But it’s also crucial not to overdo the captivating power of a beautiful picture in order not to repeat the mistakes that organisators of Fyre did. The imagery must be in sync with the final results aiming to leave up the expectations.

Are your potential attendees involved in content creation?

User-generated content is the best that can happen with a gathering since it’s additional pushing that goes to different channels and is welcomed by other people more warmly since it’s not considered as an advertisement, yet is a significant force in festival branding in the UK. There are many actions to take to encourage your audience to create their content based on your event.

To illustrate this idea we can’t bypass mentioning Oktoberfest in our brief. Thousands of fans post videos related to the festival even when it isn’t going to be soon. They pose in clothes that are chosen by a great number of the people visiting this event, and post videos from the festival. This festival has a recognisable identity that with only imagery recall the association with Octoberfest even in the minds of those people who have never been there.

Are there any influencers that could promote your event?

Collaboration with celebrities and bloggers who have been followed by thousands or even millions of people is a thing that can rock even brand new gatherings. In doing so, there’s not always a need to hire famous people whose bills reach the stars. If your celebration is intended for the local community, it’s wise to contact those influencers who are famous amongst the locals to be ambassadors.

The cooperation between you and the influencers might include them participating in certain activities – local bands giving a gig, master-classes from professionals or working mostly online, spreading the awareness of your initiative, using your festival branding design in their posts and videos, reminding people of the gathering and so on.

Do you use all possible media platforms?

The variety of platforms you can involve in forming your festival digital persona are astonishingly wide and should be chosen carefully in accordance with the scale and speciality of your event. Expecting to appeal to people of certain professions, there is a reason to have a few posts on Linkedin. Preparing for the celebration for the younger category, you need to consider publishing something on TikTok.

For the gathering that tends to be an annual occurrence, it’s wise to create separate accounts on different websites and update the information once in a while so your attendees could keep in mind it and make plans for the future. Explore more marketing event statistics to be in the know of more tendencies.

Sum up

Ascertaining the right image for your event, pulling at the heartstrings and building a reputation that will be both trustworthy and solid will facilitate including your celebration into as a destination point by tourists and develop your city’s image with the means we described in our synopsis. Yet, to make sure that the writing is on the wall, it’s essential to do everything in accordance with the standards and take care of even insignificant details.

Knowing how difficult it is to find the help from professionals that possess the necessary skills and at the same time fit you culturally and are able to spotlight your strength, we offer you to get use of our platform. All you need to do is to fill the form and mention the details of your project and we will guide you in searching for an innovative vendor that matches your requirements.