Our work for Campus Oil

Campus Oil corporate identity

22 May 2004

Campus Oil is a company within the Stafford Holdings Group, a leading Irish-owned fuel distribution company. In 2003, Stafford Holdings was building its market position as a distributor of industrial and agricultural diesel, home heating oil and petrol retailing. The oil and petrol distribution business of the group had, until then, been operated through a number of separate companies (including Campus Oil and Stafford Oil) and regional and local distributorships. In 2003, it was decided to consolidate all fuel distribution under one single brand — Campus.

Project brief
The brief was to develop a new Campus brand that would unite the various companies into a single operating unit, would reflect the corporate values that were driving the development plan and would make a strong consumer-facing statement. The key Campus attributes to be projected in the identity were: professional, active, friendly, dynamic and solid.

Objectives and commercial targets
The objectives set for the new brand identity were to:
* Raise the profile of the group in the Irish oil industry and generate increased trade through new service-station dealerships.
* Differentiate Campus as a major Irish-owned company and generate clear marketplace stand-out in a sector dominated mainly by multinational competitors.
* Help to integrate and unify a number of existing companies and acquisitions.

Design route
To create strong differentiation from its competitors, we designed the new brand identity system so that Campus could take ownership of the colour orange within their marketplace. We created a striking new brand mark that embodied the modern and dynamic approach the company was taking. We redesigned all signage and customer touch-points, including the pumps, canopies and totems, for the Campus retail forecourts. We created a new livery for the fleet of oil-delivery vehicles that gave more emphasis to the Campus brand and brought regional distributors under a strong central brand identity. Sub-brands such as the QED fuel card were rationalised and brought under the new corporate identity. We created a range of marketing communications, including literature explaining the brand migration to existing customers of the various companies within the group. We created a corporate-identity management system for Campus to control the identity roll-out by the many contractors involved in the nationwide implementation programme.

Effectiveness of the project results

The identity project was a substantial investment in the Campus brand and helped position the company as a key player in the fuel-oil distribution and retailing industry. It has achieved its key objectives. The new image has raised Campus's profile in the industry and generated increased interest from service-station dealers, leading to a 20% increase in business through that channel. The brand identity is seen as being warm, colourful and interesting, and it contrasts favourably with competitors, who are, in the main, remote multinational companies with impersonal design and imagery. This has been of considerable benefit in differentiating Campus from competitors in all channels and reinforces Campus's objective to be innovative marketers of an old commodity product. This has had measurable benefits on sales volumes.

The new brand identity was created and launched at a time when Campus were integrating a number of different acquisitions that previously had their own very different identities. The new identity helped to unify the various people and cultures, and enabled the introduction of radical change.

This project won silver in the 2005 GDBA Irish Design Effectiveness Awards in the category for corporate identity projects with an implementation cost of over fifty thousand euro.