Brand Research, Positioning & Design
For MINI/ADO and U-Dox Creative

MINI came to me with a unique brief – “If we’re still just selling cars by 2025, we’re in trouble” This was an open brief to understand what other areas of culture MINI could legitimately inhabit and keep them relevant for a younger generation.

The started off with a desired audience – the creative class. Trouble was that the creative class had been written about and commentated on to death. What more could I possibly say that hadn’t already been said, and how could this differentiate the brand?

I did consumer research in the UK and US and commissioned some in the Far East, and I found out that the creative class was a class of three types – the thriving 0.1%, the striving 10% and the struggling long tail of 90%.  They had no space to live in the cities they needed to be to be creative, far less studio space.

MINI as a brand with spatial engineering at it’s heart (made in response to the Suez Crisis where the requirement was a smaller car) should set out to solve these problems and secure the future of the rising creative class in the places they needed to be in.

We championed MINI’s spatial design heritage to showcase how cities could utilise remanent space to house the living and working lives of the upcoming creative class, undertook visual and brand language, and created partnerships with Dezeen to showcase the installations in Beijing and Berlin and urban cabins in LA.