Connecting London’s one million SME community

London has always been a city of entrepreneurs. It’s estimated that there are over one million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the capital today, employing thousands of people and playing a key role at the heart of local communities.

We’d previously helped London & Partners to create the Grow London brand aimed at boosting inbound and outbound business investment in London. Grow London Local was focussed on a more targeted audience — the capital’s SME community.

When we think of ambitious businesses we might imagine tech companies or creative start-ups, however there are growing SMEs in every sector; from haulage to hairdressing; legal to landscaping. The success of these small businesses is imperative not only to London’s economy, but to society and culture. Grow London Local offers every London SME free access to advice and support to help them grow their business. It brings together a wealth of support all in one easy-to-access place.

Our starting point was to create a simple, compelling message that would sit at the heart of the campaign. Working quickly and in partnership with the client team, we developed a series of core concepts that we discussed and refined. Almost from the outset, one idea proved to be the clear leader.

When developing the creative concepts we were looking for a ‘hook’, a memorable idea that would be easy to recall and understand. For Grow, this proved to be linking the one million SMEs with the one place to get information — communicating both scale and a point of focus. For an SME founder or owner, the approach would also show that there’s a huge number of others in their position — building a sense of community.

There was one further requirement when developing the launch campaign — it had to have the ability to stretch across many channels; from radio adverts and a TV campaign, to localised posts on the Nextdoor app.

Although it had yet to launch, Grow London Local had a brand in place. We amplified the chevron to become a key component of the campaign. It becomes a device for demonstrating the sheer scale of the community, drawing the eye through the messaging on the moving image applications, and putting focus onto the call to action.

The chosen creative direction not only works visually, but also verbally — this was especially important as it needed to convey the same messaging as a radio advert.