brief
A confidential client in Saudi Arabia required a strategy to steer the transformation of a loosely-defined cultural district into a cohesive, highly-frequented epicentre of creativity, education, and entertainment. The ambition was to develop a holistic strategic plan for the entire district, while creating distinct individual strategies for three existing assets: a non-profit foundation, an educational entity, and an arts-and-craft centre. Within the context of the Kingdom’s rapid development and promotion of cultural destinations, articulating a clearly differentiated positioning was a vital deliverable.
RESPONSE
Building from the assets out.
Identifying and strategically cultivating the complementarities of the three existing assets (a not-for-profit foundation, a higher educational institution, and an arts-and-craft centre) was the key to both sharpening the assets’ USPs and anchoring the entire district’s positioning.
A three-tiered strategic approach.
An overarching cultural district strategy was built on the foundations of partnership and programming strategies. Through these, the client was able not only to fine-tune distinctive programming outcomes (enriched by upstream considerations of audience typologies, institutional reputation objectives, and clear content criteria) but also to navigate collaborations, sponsorships, and investment opportunities, ensuring the district’s long-term sustainability.
Paradigm shift: the district perceived as an idea-generator
The three strategies responded to a set of concentric expectations from the local community, the wider region’s ambitions for economic growth, and the Kingdom’s existing strategic aims and policies. However, the ultimate value-add might be articulated as the start of an important paradigm shift not just for the district, but for the region and potentially Saudi itself: anchoring this district as a creative yet deeply relevant site of experimentation and unconventional thinking, hard-wired into its community, shifts perception away from being an importer of ideas, to being an accurately positioned cultural idea generator.
