A new brand for Skern Lodge, the UK's leading adventure learning and skills business
Skern is a world leader in outdoor adventure, apprenticeship, and skills training for children and young adults. They create positive life change through lasting learning.
The Challenge
How do you resolve life-changing apprenticeship training with children’s adventure-learning within a single brand?
Skern asked us to evolve their brand. It had become inconsistent and confusing. It didn't reflect its successful growth driven by broadening its services and locations.
The Solution
We set out to create master and sub brands that could retain existing equity and unify a visual identity for B2B and B2C audiences.
We collaborated with Skern to define a brand framework and architecture that could be applied across their businesses. We mapped audience groups, researched Skern’s competitors, and formalised how their services should fit together.
We created a new master brand and two sub-brands, one for adventure learning, the other for skills and training. We simplified the master brand to the single word ‘Skern’, and the sub-brands to ‘Skern Adventure’ and ‘Skern Skills’.
Creative and strategy outputs included frameworks, audiences, propositions, competitor review and stakeholder interviews. We developed new brand guidelines that included new logos, naming conventions, lock-ups, visual identities, motion and voice guides for different audiences.
The new identity is based on the concept of navigating life experience.
The name Skern means ‘Safe Harbour’, which we expanded to mean a ‘safe place (to learn and make mistakes)’.
We wanted the brand to reference this idea of place, so we introduced stylised contours, one for each part of the business, while the logo became a bold map pointer, signifying a safe, welcoming place to learn in the landscape.
The contours, along with complementary colour palettes, create a clear distinction between different businesses.
The Results
"We needed our brand to reflect a new business architecture and work effectively across every part of Skern. Our previous brand had been developed for a single outdoor centre, but the business had evolved. We now needed a clear master brand alongside two distinct sub-brands — Skern Adventure, bringing our two outdoor centres together as a collective offer, and Skern Skills, an apprenticeship provider with a very different audience and set of needs.
The master brand was essential in bringing everything together, showing how the sub-brands complement one another and clearly telling the story of our full range of services. At the same time, the sub-brands allow each part of the business to better meet the needs of their specific markets, and enable our two outdoor centres to be promoted in a complementary way rather than appearing to compete.
Nucco were great partners throughout the entire process. Their strategic thinking, thoughtful guidance and consistently strong advice helped us make confident decisions. They delivered outstanding creative ideas and, just as importantly, helped streamline our language so we can now explain our complex business far more clearly. We couldn’t recommend Nucco highly enough and are incredibly proud of the brand we’ve created."
Harriet Appleyard
Head of Brand and Marketing
Skern Group
