Sunshine Coast Agricultural Show

Coming from a very corporate blue colour scheme we sought to bring some life to the 3-day family friendly entertainment event. We achieved a coherent brand image by adopting a new brand primary yellow colour, which stood out in a crowd of people, aligned with the Sunshine Coast as well as being easily recognisable as a bright, bubbly and fun filled brand.

The event is organised and run completely by volunteers with a lot of their systems relying on old-school paper trails. We redefined this by developing a website that dynamically changes depending on the time of year. This included timeframes for ‘off-season’ whereby we seek feedback and the website goes into a ‘dormant’ state as this is what the website is for the majority of the year.

We also included a ‘pre-season’ timeframe which promotes what is coming up for the next Show as well as ways to get involved. We then produced a ‘show-time’ timeframe which converts the whole website to a state designed around usability during the 3-day show. This includes showing what is currently happening on each stage, what events are on at a given time, all live and dynamic for the viewer.

We also expanded the sponsorship acquisition journey to be less reliant on coffee catchups and into a model where the catch up still happens, but what a business wants to sponsors is entirely up to them. This is done using a dynamic journey where they pick and choose what they wish to sponsor as well as showing the value for each option. This added transparency to the process and allowed sponsors to not be locked in to activations they weren’t interested in.

We then moved our attention onto exhibitors/vendors. The old system required a lot of paperwork to be filled out and submitted via email. We moved this system to an online dashboard whereby vendors can create an account, fill in a form which estimates their site value. Once submitted, it creates a public listing for patrons to interact with the vendor directly.

Our attention then turned to marketing, the goal within 5 years was to grow the Show from under 20,000 patrons over the 3 days, to over 30,000 within 5 years. We achieved and surpassed this goal within 4 years reaching 35,000 patrons over the 3 days. This was done by strategically marketing through social media, radio, TV and billboards to demographics that were identified as their ideal customer.