'Everything is experience' in Land Securities Group rebrand

Owning over 2,400,000 m2 of property across the UK, including central London retail space One New Change, Tottenham Court Road’s Dominion Theatre and the Easton Park estate in Great Dunmow, Essex, the corporation previously known as the Land Securities Group is the UK’s largest commercial property development and investment company. However, despite its focus on developing places for visitors, the group was keen to portray the people at the heart of its structures – beginning with a name change to Landsec.

Leading Landsec’s rebrand is independent creative agency Pollitt & Partners. Taking a collaborative approach to foster participation in all aspects of Landsec’s brand, Pollitt & Partners based its rebrand strategy on the concept ‘Everything is experience.’

Key to the rebrand was engaging with and involving stakeholders, particularly Landsec employees, to ensure the brand reflected their experience of the organisation. This sense of brand ownership was paramount, explains Jo Smee, account director at Pollitt & Partners, in ensuring the historic brand translated smoothly into the modern age. “It was important to engage people throughout different areas of the business to ensure they felt the brand was relevant to them,” says Smee.

And contemporising the brand involved evolving the Land Securities Group name, which had been in use since 1944. This change allowed the organisation to retain ownership of its core identity while modernising its logo and brand assets for a more contemporary age. This shift is complemented by a new font, created by Pollitt & Partners – the bespoke, geometric style to Landsec Brown reinforces the forward-facing rebrand. A streamlined visual brand, which lends flexibility to Landsec's various properties, also allows the corporation to rethink its corporate identity. Retaining the cornerstone motif as its logomark was integral in developing this corporate brand consolidation and denoting Landsec’s ambitions. The motif underpins its portfolio and is represented across Landsec's brand architecture, yet is oft-forgotten amid the company’s properties which each take on a unique, customer-facing identity.

With research revealing that Landsec’s brand has the most impact at the customer experience level, the cornerstone motif ties the organisation to its historic roots while signalling Landsec’s desire to build its brand from inside out. Barry Tranter, design director at Pollitt & Partners, says, “The cornerstone sits at the heart of the new brand. As well as representing experience and experiences as the foundation at Landsec it influences the visual style throughout.”

For Sev Sobhee, brand and marketing director at Landsec, the new communications strategy is reflective of Landsec’s internal and external culture, generating an optimism perhaps missing from previous iterations. Sobhee says, “Delivering a new brand identity for a FTSE100 business is no mean feat, but I’m thrilled with what we’ve created. The new Landsec brand represents a very fitting evolution of our business, and gives us a contemporary identity that better aligns to how we deliver experiences across our portfolio."

The definition of cornerstone, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘An important quality or feature on which a particular thing depends or is based.’ With a portfolio worth an estimated £14bn, creating a brand that transcends its visual identity to capture the imagination of its numerous stakeholders is of utmost importance. By using Landsec’s historic brand equity as a cornerstone from which to develop a modern identity applicable across its whole portfolio, Pollitt & Partners successfully directs the corporation into a new architectural age.