Aston Villa Football Club

The Client

A leading premiership football club with a national and international fan base and blue-chip partnerships including Nike. Aside from the core ticket revenue and merchandising streams the club has a number of stakeholder audiences who they need to talk to on a regular basis, one of these being children in and around the city of Birmingham. To reach this audience, Wyatt created a colourful and eye catching campaign.

The Campaign

Aston Villa Football Club has a key role to play in the city and none more so than among its young residents. Engaging with children across different parts of the city is important to Aston Villa as it seeks to provide a safe, family oriented and fun arena for development. Sport has a major role to play in the wellbeing of young children and our redevelopment of their children’s membership club – JV-Life was key in helping Aston Villa reach out with a powerful and positive message.

The club (previously known as Junior Villans) had performed reasonably well but was increasingly seen as outdated and so our brief was to inject some vibrancy, vitality and relevance with a new look and feel.

Wyatt started the process by developing a strategic platform which was defined as ‘where heroes are made’. What this encapsulated was the idea that children who crave individuality and success now have the opportunity to stand out – to achieve something which can be shared with friends and family. The Wyatt design team then translated this positioning into a creative execution that resulted in a complete makeover for the club mascots, Hercules and Bella. A third mascot - Chip - was created and introduced, designed to directly appeal to pre-tweens. The use of characters was seen by the agency as a fundamental part of the strategy, hence we created a trio of personalities that would each strike a chord with different children.

To support the makeover, Wyatt designed a range of materials from posters to websites. The family stand at Villa Park was completely dressed with oversized illustrations of the characters to achieve stand out, especially during TV coverage.

The Results

Right across web forums fans are talking about the redesigned mascots and their appeal is clear for all to see! Uptake in the membership scheme has been increasing on a month on month basis and across the city, Hercules, Bella and Chip are now established role models for young children.

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