Residents gathered on Thursday, January 11, for a workshop focused on exploring and jointly defining influential central brand visions and themes for the North Downtown Athens development. All existing Bethel residents were invited to provide feedback during the collaborative workshop, which was hosted inside the Lay Park Community Center and led by national place branding consultants, Prismatic.
During this workshop, the group had an open forum discussion and engaged in brainstorming activities designed to inspire, socialize, and determine core brand vision themes that could inspire the next stage: determining the development’s name.
Prismatic started the workshop by expressing that everyone’s voices matter and ideas need to be heard in order to inform directions that would ultimately make sense in establishing a novel identity for the development and celebrating its future lifestyle promise.
From there, Prismatic aired a short summary video about the history of the neighborhood, which references content featured in the history report that was created by LK Preservation Specialists.
The workshop reflected on the history of the neighborhood, its personality, current position, and its future through the lens of its impact in the lives of former and current residents. Activities and exercises explored during the workshop included:
- Keywords brainstorm
- Brand character spectrum scales
- Brand archetypes
- Identification of emerging vision themes
After exercises and activities were complete, the group explored emerging themes from the ideas and perspectives shared throughout the workshop. Vision themes that emerged were written onto posters, and all participants were asked to provide their input about each one. The resulting themes included:
- Everlasting as in a steady, strong loyal foundation for life and a bridge uniting the past, current, and future of the neighborhood
- Village as in a supportive, proud, loyal, loving and connected community of neighbors
- Transformation as in agility and adaptability
- Pride as in standing tall, loyalty, and unwavering connection to neighborhood
- Location such as Midtown Athens, Uptown
- Movement as in energy and spirit
Empowered with the results of the community brand vision workshop, Prismatic will be advancing the next stage of the project, which includes developing name concepts for the master development and future phases of the development. Once complete, these concepts will be shared with the community for feedback using a mobile-friendly survey platform through https://ndathens.com/.
After the community has provided feedback on the name concepts, Prismatic will develop logo design concepts for the selected master development name and the phase 1 residential building name. These concepts will then be shared again with the public for their input using the same survey platform.
