Strong Brand­ing For Success­ful ROI: MiWay

March 14, 2016

Story

The City of Missis­sauga, one of the largest finan­cial centres in Canada, launched their dynamic MiWay brand and gener­ated one of the great­est rider­ship increases in Mississauga’s tran­sit history. The new brand was poised to reshape percep­tion and signal signif­i­cant change.

Within one week of the brand launch, MiWay gener­ated 708,239 revenue rides, the high­est weekly rider­ship in their history. In its first quar­ter the new brand achieved a 6.1 per cent increase in rider­ship, and over a two year period recorded its great­est ever rider­ship increase of 5.9 per cent. This excep­tional increase was due to the intro­duc­tion of an excit­ing new iden­tity and visual language by Entro Commu­ni­ca­tions, coupled with an aggres­sive market­ing campaign.

Key To Success: Build An Aspi­ra­tional Posi­tion
A brand strat­egy defined the new posi­tion­ing state­ment, which empha­sized “an easy and stress-free” way to get to work. To commu­ni­cate this posi­tion­ing, Entro devel­oped a simple, easy to recall, and memo­rable name that commu­ni­cated this posi­tion­ing. Addi­tion­ally, with a play on “MiWay” resi­dents could claim owner­ship of the name.

Key to Success: Create a Unique and Memo­rable Brand Iden­tity
A new visual language informed through a new visual iden­tity was created that has been easily trans­lated across all touch­points to create an inte­grated system iden­tity. This included all market­ing collat­eral and design of public assets includ­ing bus graph­ics and signage and wayfind­ing across all services and routes. Brand guide­lines were devel­oped to ensure consis­tency across all plat­forms.