Uist Wool is a community benefit society operating a spinning mill and wool centre on the island of Grimsay in the Outer Hebrides.

They recently ran a three year training programme ‘Calanas’ supported by the European Social Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund. The programme included a wool-work CPD offering six participants in-depth understanding of work practices in the wool production sector from sheep management through to product design and marketing. Participants included designer-makers, artists and representatives of small local businesses.

As part of this course Culture Republic delivered a bespoke workshop focusing on communications development, which combined channel marketing with the ways that a storytelling approach can contribute to brand development.

The workshop helped participants to understand their potential audiences and recognise the implications of audience segmentation for communications. By identifying who their products would serve and how, the group could begin to consider what communications channels would best meet their audiences’ needs. Participants’ diverse portfolios of work meant that, in many cases, they had to think about not just one product but several, and that their target audiences were correspondingly diverse.

Participants took the opportunity to think about the brand and character of their work, in order to pick communications channels that most suited their individual products, personalities and ambitions.

Drawing on examples of small organisations and ‘one-man-brands’ the workshop highlighted how effective storytelling can help to build a strong brand identity. The group looked at ways of embedding regular on-brand and on-message communications into their creative processes to break down the barriers that exist between artistic practice and communications. For the participants based in the Outer Hebrides this often meant looking at how marketing techniques could recreate the sense of place that underpinned the creation of their work. For example, by sharing behind the scenes narratives as they happen digital media could be used to bring the context of their work to life.