Populous House at SXSW
Turning a global architecture brand into a live experience
Populous designs the places where people experience some of their most memorable collective moments. For SXSW, my team and I wanted to explore the human behavior behind those spaces and explore the question, "“what does it take to design spaces in which people feel they truly belong?”
Armed with the goal of creating a sense of belonging and bringing the brand to life in an immersive experience, we developed Me to We, as a name that would be the foundation for Populous House.
This concept informed everything from the visual identity and environment, to panel topics and participants, to local Austin musical talent I worked with a booking agent to secure.
Creating the vision “Me to We”
Telling the brand story
Experiential marketing is about so much more than activating a space with your logo. Our goal for Populous House programming at SXSW was to show our audience how a brand differentiated by its people thinks about some of the most important and relevant topics in sports and entertainment.
We considered work Populous was pursuing, work we were actively doing, the conversations we were having with clients, and the stories we wanted to tell in upcoming interviews and in the press. Then we designed the programming to be a continuation of stories we were already telling.
We developed topics that reinforced our positioning, invited clients and industry voices who could bring those conversations to life, and intentionally invited the right audiences into the room. The goal was consistency: what someone heard from Populous House should reinforce what they heard from us in an interview, read about us in the press, or experienced working with our team.
Bringing the brand to life
Every part of Populous House was designed to reinforce the same idea—from the physical environment and interactive moments to music, hospitality and the way people moved through the space.
I led the experience strategy across teams, working with creative, communications, design, production and business leadership to turn the concept into a cohesive physical expression of the Populous brand.
Instead of asking people to hear what Populous believes about bringing people together, we created a place where they could experience it themselves.
