Scottish Cycling Mini Riders
Scottish Cycling have launched their new children’s cycling programme titled ‘Mini Riders’, aimed at children who love riding their bikes. Targeting 4–8-year-olds, Mini Riders is designed to fill the gap in the current pathway between learning to ride a bike, and joining and engaging in club activity, the programme providing fun cycling sessions for children to develop their cycling confidence and learn new skills. The creation of this new product is designed to mirror the experience that children enjoy in their early stages, developing the fundamental skills of cycling. With the focus on the pure enjoyment that riding a bike brings to children, this programme is different to others that concentrate solely on road safety, what can go wrong and dangers to avoid.
The emphasis of Mini Riders is to provide children with the opportunity to ‘catch the cycling bug’ so it’s more likely they will continue to progress along the cycling sport pathway, with the happy consequence of cycling more safely and embracing the sport as part of their life. If we can help them along their way and keep them cycling longer, we can help to deliver against Scottish Cyclings’ wider strategy to ‘Developing a Nation of Cyclists’ and who knows, maybe our next generation of cycling super stars will emerge as a direct result of this programme.
All that remains is to introduce you to ‘Jax’, our Mini Riders’ cheerleader! JAX was created with illustrator Dave Williams and as a result of our research with the target audience of young children. The need for a gender and ethnicity neutral, humanoid character. We looked at a range of concepts deciding to develop one made up of mechanical bike parts as it proved most popular across our focus groups.
Deliverables:
- Audience insight
- Brand strategy
- Visual identity
- Motion graphics
- Brand toolkit of assets
“My experience of working with Brand Oath to create a brand for the new Scottish Cycling Sport Development programme, Mini Riders, was nothing but positive. The whole process was one that I had no previous experience of and they were extremely helpful and supportive in guiding us through the whole process. They appreciated that the whole experience was relatively new to us and the biggest thing was their level of communication throughout, they were always happy to chat things over.
“This started right from the beginning, in the ideation workshop session, where they expertly managed to identify and formalise ideas that we weren’t initially able to pinpoint ourselves. Establishing consensus across our team, enabling the development of a strong strategic platform, that we are confident will communicate our offer effectively to our audiences and meet our objectives.
“We had given them a narrow brief around a topic that as far as we know, few people have tried before, however what they provided was exactly what we were after. Brand Oath were also very flexible, quickly turning things round, even when we changed the goalposts at short notice!
We recently launched the programme and the brand along with the newly created mascot, JAX have been really well received. I would highly recommend Brand Oath to any sport governing body looking for support in this field.”
Jamie Taylor, Club Development Manager, Children and Young People, Scottish Cycling.