Dubai Municipality
Reinventing the brand positioning, identity, architecture and narrative for Dubai’s very first government entity established in 1954.
Making Dubai more, Every Day
Established in 1954 by His Highness Sheikh Rashid, Dubai Municipality is known as the “Mother of all government entities.” Today, Dubai Municipality is still responsible for an unmatched 14 core business functions, spanning all aspects of the day-to-day experience of living and working in Dubai. From managing Dubai’s iconic skyline and mapping rights of way to enable flying taxis, to innovative waste management practices that create energy from our trash, to maintaining safe and beautiful public parks and beaches for Dubai’s residents and over 12 million tourists a year.
Dubai Municipality is the invisible force driving the future of Dubai.
Through extensive interviews with Dubai Municipality’s senior leadership, Supreme Committee members, employees, partners and vendors, and an external brand audit, we identified a target brand positioning for Dubai Municipality that reflects the real impact the entity continues to create for the city — an impact that residents, business owners and government peers too often take for granted.
Our next task was to uplift the brand identity and craft a new narrative strategy to tell the untold story of Dubai Municipality, and the essential work it does to make Dubai more, every day.
Small Changes for a Big Impact
Dubai Municipality has an established brand presence that touches every aspect of life in Dubai. Building upon the existing brand platform, we executed a series of precision refinements to the logomark to ensure maximum scalability across print and digital mediums. We then replaced and rescaled the typeface, selecting a clean, modern pairing of English and Arabic text to achieve enhanced legibility.
Anchored in a fresh yet elegant primary brand color reflecting Dubai Municipality’s strategic transformation, we defined a secondary color palette in vibrant hues that embody the energy, urgency and care that drives the work of Dubai Municipality.
branding is sometimes about doing very little in order to change almost everything.
Leveraging small changes to create a city-wide impact, we radically revisioned the Dubai Municipality visual brand within a framework is instantly recognizable and newly energizing for all audiences. Our strategic objective was always to build on the heritage, while setting sights on a minimalistic and elegant approach to telling the story.
we studied 2,000+ touch-points to unify the new positioning and messaging.
United by a shared purpose and clearly re-architected stories, we spent time building an inventory of touch-points and experiences across the city of Dubai — ranging from public destinations like parks and beaches, to infrastructure support vehicles and certifications. The new narrative needed to be clear, memorable and instantly recognizable as the new Dubai Municipality. We multiplied reach with a cohesive Brand System to allow and client and agency teams to understand and deploy assets, messaging and impact.
STORY PILLARS
we created four story pillars with a framework of simplified key messages.
Led by the central marketing team, the new communication framework is not only unifying the message that Dubai Municipality delivers to the public and its stakeholders, ensuring a consistent story is told.
Whether its an announcement of a new mountain bike path in Mushrif Park or a new geospatial survey service — but also to proactively share news of DM’s achievements internally across departments for a cohesive, inspired whole.
The strategic objectives and functions of the organization were mapped against four story pillars, to align thinking and articulating of anything communicated internally or externally. A communication system was built to support the pillars with key messaging and evidence points. We unified terminology with a tone of voice and supporting assets to effectively tell stories.
Narrative for Change
To anchor the transformation, we began by unifying Dubai Municipality employees around a common purpose that recognizes and elevates their contribution to making Dubai on the best cities in the world to live and work in. Across 4 agencies and 2 sectors, Dubai Municipality’s 11,000 employees are tirelessly committed to making Dubai more, every day.
Dubai municipality is making Dubai more beautiful, more sustainable, more liveable and more pioneering every day.
Learn more about Dubai Municipality on dm.gov.ae