EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

The challenge:

The lack of involvement of Europe’s citizens in the 2014 elections prompted the European Parliament to act to improve its image and communication, to enhance the education of the values and fundamental role it plays in maintaining democracy in Europe and the World, and to facilitate interactions with the citizens it represents.

Because the various Directorate Generals had become used to developing their own communication initiatives leading to increasingly confused communication emanating from the Parliament, the objective was to model the excellence of the institution and to use this groundwork to lay the foundations for a more efficient and coherent communication strategy.

What transpired:

The legitimacy of the European Parliament comes from the fact that it is a space where everyone can express themselves freely. This inherently makes it a place of tension, a place for tensions to be expressed. At the same time, it is also a place where you go to defuse these tensions. The way the European Parliament does this is by being both fully open and fully contained at the same time. Containment is the ‘rigidity’ that allows the openness to be there. This is what enables the EP to overcome all the complexity it faces and how the seemingly impossible becomes possible.

The result:

We accompanied the DG Communication of the European Parliament on a two-year mission. The first was dedicated to understanding what lies at the very heart of the European Parliament, its core identity and unicity. The following year was devoted to translating the freshly revealed DNA of the institution into a thoroughly up-dated visual and graphic identity, brand narrative and tone-of-voice. After being formally approved by the Secretary General of the European Parliament, the new identity was translated into a dedicated brand book and identity guidelines manual that were gradually implemented across the different Directorate Generals of the European parliament.