DISCOVERY OVERVIEW
We encouraged and embraced participation from a very wide range of people and organisations – over 200 in total – to ensure our story would be both rich and representative of the diversity of our region. To do this we commissioned an independent branding agency to facilitate the process in order to keep it fair and open.
THERE WERE 4 STAGES INVOLVED: THE WAIKATO ATTRIBUTES / WORKSHOP OUTPUTS / KEY STORY ELEMENTS / THE STORY FRAMEWORK
THE WAIKATO ATTRIBUTES
Through an online survey, we asked people from across the Waikato region to contribute to the Waikato Story by sharing the top three associations of the Waikato today – and for the future. The attributes today are mostly centred around landscape and farming, while the attributes for tomorrow are focused on people, innovation and performance.
WORD CLOUDS
TODAY & TOMORROW STATEMENTS
Download the attached PDFs of word clouds. These represent the key words people chose to represent the symbols of the Waikato region. Each of the PDFs relates to a workshop in Te Aroha, Hamilton and Taupo representatives.
Te Aroha word clouds
(Download 82k PDF)
Hamilton word clouds
(Download 92k PDF)
Taupo word clouds
(Download 84k PDF)
Download the attached PDFs to see the attributes as described for today and the future. Each of the PDFs relates to a workshop in Taupo, Te Aroha, Hamilton or with iwi and youth representatives.
Te Aroha statements
(Download 98K PDF)
Hamilton statements
(Download 131k PDF)
Taupo statements
(Download 109k PDF)
Waikato iwi and youth statements
(Download 42k PDF)
WORKSHOP OUTPUTS
We used the same set of unique and proprietary tools belonging to Principals Branding Ltd to help us arrive at consensus. A brief introduction to these tools and an explanation of the results can be found here.
PERSONALITY
VOICEMAPS
We allow for 3 personality traits that in turn define the way we tell our story; an Emotive Trait, A Rational Trait and a Reaction (how we want to be seen by others)
Te Aroha personality outputs
(Download 986k PDF)
Hamilton personality outputs
(Download 1.2MB PDF)
Taupo personality outputs
(Download 985k PDF)
Waikato iwi and youth personality outputs
(Download 450k PDF)
The VoiceMaps™ tools helps us plot tone across a number of variable factors like volume, energy and sociability to ensure consistency.
The VoiceMap™ results were remarkably consistent across all 4 workshops – with each not being party to prior results. This gave us a powerful indication that we were ‘on the right track’.
Click image above to view.
PERSONALITY OUTPUTS
VOICEMAPS OUTPUTS
This VoiceMap shows the combined average of each trait between all workshops - as you can see it was very close.
Click image above to view.
The Personality traits were all bold and strong – and gave us a fantastic depth of material to work with.
Personality outputs from all workshops
(Download 32k PDF)
KEY STORY ELEMENTS
All attendees to the workshop (and some who couldn’t attend) were given the opportunity to respond to a series of 4 simple questions. They could be as subjective and creative as they liked. The questions were; ‘What is the Waikato?’, ‘What do we do differently?’, ‘Who’s our primary audience?’ and then try and define 3 main benefits.
Waikato survey responses
(Download 68K PDF)
THE STORY FRAMEWORK
The final stage before creating the story, was to distil and refine all the contributions of the story elements into a coherent form. We used a very simple ‘outline structure for this – and tried to identify the richest ‘themes’. A steering group helped give us the raw material for the themes and messages for the final story draft.
Story framework workshop outputs
(Download 5.2MB PDF)