With a goal to shake-up an expected promotional campaign, Lattice Pop-Up Trucks was developed out of an ambition to delight and be a memorable Lattice brand awareness campaign. Aiming to connect with people, both familiar and unfamiliar with Lattice, these trucks on-the-go became an exciting canvas to expand our brand ethos. The opportunity was a new outlet for our typical events. We hadn’t done anything this scale outside of conferences in over 3 years. There were plenty of ideas for what we could do. The challenge was honing in on a content focus while building a system that allowed for flexibility to be adapted across a slew of distinct touchpoints.
At the project's outset we had only a few concrete details to begin visual and messaging explorations. We knew it would be a truck to serve treats. We knew it would be in 4 different cities. We knew roughly what the messaging was aiming to accomplish. Otherwise everything else was unknown. Even as we started to design the truck we needed to define the truck’s role in the context of how it existed in each space’s ecosystem. What was the visual focus?
1. Brand Awareness – Truck as a beacon of Lattice?
2. Messaging forward – Truck as a tool to educate about an offering or product?
3. Delight – Get people interested in a non-product emphasized fashion?
After conversations with partners we were able to articulate a hypothetical user journey for how an attendee would interact with the truck that helped us design messaging hierarchy across touchpoints (signage, swag, social media). This helped us navigate where we needed to be redundant and where we needed to expand the Pop-Up story.
The development of messaging is a crucial element in plotting the visual needs and allows for a more holistic understanding of how the various assets connect to a larger story. We didn’t have this clarity as we started. We used this gap as an opportunity to have the visuals help articulate the thematic need. We then phased out development of high fidelity assets as we solidified the specificities of the Pop-Up. Practically speaking, as ideas were forming we leaned into abstract visuals to help keep us nimble. As offerings became more solidified we invested more in higher fidelity visuals. This was an important conversation with stakeholders around defining a problem to be solved, versus presenting a solution within a brief.
The scope of assets allowed our team to let the brand shine. Typically, our team creates digital only assets, but the truck exterior, signage, uniforms and merchandise allowed the brand team to work in the real world. We created a series of wheat posters, specific to the NYC event location. We utilized animation to inform attendees of offerings and directly connect the purpose of the event to the treats they were consuming. These physical outputs informed the way we considered color, artwork and most importantly scale. Projects like these require the team to lean heavily in the visual foundations of the brand, while also finding moments specific to a project to expand and delight. Our goal with this project was to create brand awareness. Rooting an event built to bring people together over free treats was an amazing canvas to create something special. It’s a hint of what’s to come as we build community, lean into ambitious campaigns and push the Lattice brand further in 2024.
The Pop-Up trucks not only served as marketing vehicles but also as dynamic reflections of our brand. They helped to highlight where we want to take the brand both visually and experientially.
