Evolving a trusted brand for a digital-first world.

Issue
As Premier Inn’s business expanded across markets and platforms, its long-standing visual identity began to show its limitations. Rooted in a core palette of purple and white with a functional and simplified design system, the brand struggled to flex across the growing number of tactical campaigns, sub-brands, and digital environments. The lack of versatility hinders creativity in marketing communications, reducing impact in eCRM. It made it challenging to deliver a consistent yet dynamic identity across regions, particularly as new products, services, and audiences emerged.

Insight
We recognised that the brand needed to evolve from a static identity into a flexible system to stay relevant and recognisable while allowing for more differentiated storytelling. Rather than reinventing from scratch, the opportunity lay in building on the existing brand equity, especially the distinctive purple, while introducing rules that allowed for more expressive, responsive and audience-specific executions. A refreshed visual framework could empower teams to design consistently and creatively while supporting accessibility, campaign relevance, and cross-platform cohesion.

Idea
We created an evolved design system based on a new principle: the Rule of Elements. This strategic approach redefined how core, expressive, and highlight elements work together across brand communications. Key updates included expanding the colour palette to digital and print-specific tones, refining typography with new weights and expressive options and introducing flexible components such as branded panels, animated strips, AVIF-format images and an extended icon system. Tactical and value-based marketing modules were reimagined with clarity and hierarchy in mind, and the entire ecosystem was structured to feed into a forthcoming "Brand Guidelines 2.0" document for company-wide adoption.

Impact
The evolved visual identity unlocked greater creative flexibility across the business, allowing Premier Inn to engage both Leisure and Business audiences with greater clarity and relevance. Thanks to bolder typographic expression, refined messaging, and modular value-driven assets, tactical campaigns now land with more impact. This updated framework has laid the groundwork for a more cohesive and adaptable global brand presence while equipping internal teams with a versatile, future-ready toolkit that enables more consistent, confident, and creatively energised communication.