From red-light district to trendy tourist hotspot, how King’s Cross found its identity

The developers behind the regeneration of King’s Cross have paid special attention to making the area a distinctive brand, which begs the question, how do you brand a geographical region made up of different businesses and residents and used by all demographics?

Chrissy Cullen, place marketing director for King’s Cross at the developer Related Argent, is tasked with shaping the identity of the North London area. She tells The Drum that the branding of an area is an entirely different process from a product or service. “We have to be very careful and very sensitive about how we brand places and destinations because they’re places that have existed for centuries. King’s Cross belongs to the people and it belongs to London; that brand essentially doesn’t belong to us and that is why it has to be treated differently.”

The area’s history goes back to the Romans. It has ties to the Industrial Revolution, when goods were brought into London via the Regents Canal, and more recently was known for being London’s red-light district. The name itself is relatively new, dating to 1830 when a statue of King George IV was placed in the main crossroads.

“It is useful to think about how places change and evolve, so, for us, we are the custodians of the King’s Cross place now, but it will continue to evolve and it will continue to change and it will be different in the future.”

Cullen says it is important when creating a new identity for King’s Cross that it honors what came before. The Regents Canal brought coal down from the industrial north, giving Coal Drops Yard its name, while grain was stored in warehouses that inspired the naming of Granary Square.

The initial reason for making the area a brand was to distinguish it from the very famous King’s Cross Station, known by a lot of tourists for its connection to Harry Potter. “It’s important to us when we’re promoting the 67 acres that make up the King’s Cross neighborhood that it is broader than Harry Potter,” says Cullen. On a practical basis, with the station being the Eurostar terminal, it means that King's Cross is tourists’ first experience of London when they arrive from the continent. It also has the added benefit of helping people to understand where they are in London and navigate the area.

“In large parts of New York, it’s very hard to understand exactly where you are and how to work your way through the different spaces and the city doesn’t have the same system that we do in London,” Cullen points out. She spent a lot of time with the agency Elvis, looking at all the different audiences of King's Cross, including residents, students and businesses, as well as tourists and visitors. “It has to speak to everyone; if it is too narrowly defined, you end up not being welcome or open or making everyone feel like they are able to enjoy the place.”

This does mean that the media plan for King’s Cross’s marketing is complex. Asked about the channels used, Cullen simply replies, “Everything that I can afford within my budget.” King’s Cross essentially advertises across all major channels, bar TV, with a special focus on out-of-home and print for the local community – leaflets and flyers as well as local press.

The agency’s managing partner for strategy, Camilla Yates, believes King’s Cross to be one of the most successful regeneration projects in the UK. At Elvis, she helped define the recent iteration of King's Cross’s brand identity and says that creating a brand is a “shorthand way to tell a story.” Through workshops, Elvis looked at the history of the place and decided what elements to take from a “consistent memory structure” and what it wanted to evolve.

From there, the agency looked at the attributes and persona of the place and how that translated into a brand archetype based on psychologist Carl Jung’s 12 personality types. “That was a way for us to anchor a look and feel and a tone of voice and a way the brand could behave that everybody could agree on it and that felt relatively defined,” she explains.

The workshop landed on the ‘outlaw’ archetype, which Yates defines as “taking a bold stance against the status quo that talks about a better new way.” Creating this allows King’s Cross’s brand and advertising to be “rebellious and punchy in the way it presents itself,” says Yates.

King’s Cross’s summer campaign, ‘Shop It Like It’s Hot,’ shows how this marketing theory shows up in real life. The ads use saturated colors, big and bold font, with models blown out of proportion dressed in edgy clothing.

“The evolution, that heritage and ever-changing nature of what the reality of King’s Cross is – that makes it so much more authentic than going to Westfield or somewhere like that, which is purpose-built and is a cookie-cutter generic place,” adds Yates.