UNDERSTANDING AN ICON.

As an American icon, the Chicago Tribune has gone through constant evolution along with the industry that propels it. As the way we digest news has drastically changed over the last few decades, the Tribune has shifted their approach to truly understand and embrace a persona-driven approach to knowing what readers want and expect from them, based on different lifestyles. Hyperquake collaborated with an incredible Tribune team to bolster their research and bring it to life by making tangible connections with how the teams activate the brand both internally and externally for each unique audience.

THE SHIFT.

With a multi-functional team in Chicago, Hyperquake created and led a 2-day Shift workshop to dive deeper into the research, understand key brand, business, and industry challenges, distill insights, and take them through several persona-driven brand building exercises to articulate how the Chicago Tribune can understand their promise to different audiences — and more importantly, deliver on that promise. We focused our Shift on both consumer insights and the evolution of the Chicago Tribune brand narrative to embrace their heritage while also helping to realize how their future digital audience will evolve with them.

MOVING FROM PILES OF DATA TO CREATE SOMETHING MEANINGFUL.

While the Tribune team had done a brilliant job mining insights and truly understanding their audience, our goal was to help them bring all of their hard work to life strategically and creatively, to make decisions on the future of their brand. Creating a meaningful connection with sports fans who only interact with the Tribune for daily updates on the Bears, Blackhawks, Cubs, and White Sox is completely different than connecting with young professionals, new-to-Chicago socialites, and families — all have different expectations and wants from the people who create and deliver their news.

IN THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF THE PEOPLE OF CHICAGO.

So we spent the next few weeks rapidly generating visual ideas to activate the brand and business for each unique audience to help their consumer insights, marketing, sales and creative teams understand the potential of this approach. The Chicago Tribune is evolving the right way — by asking themselves a few simple questions: What do each of our audiences want and expect from us, and what is our promise to each of them? This is the approach that is driving the way their entire business evolves, in the hearts and minds of the people of Chicago.