CASE STUDY
RNLI Charity Branding: Testing a new Logo and Tagline
When UK legislation changed to require active opt-in for marketing communications, RNLI faced more than a compliance question. They saw an opportunity to revisit their logo and tagline, and make sure both were doing the work they needed to do: communicating the charity’s purpose clearly, feeling credible, and giving people a genuine reason to engage.
For a charity like RNLI, the size of the opted-in supporter base directly affects income, so increasing that number wasn’t just about compliance, it was a commercial priority.
RNLI’s supporters range from lifelong donors to people who’d never engaged with the charity before. The challenge was finding a new creative direction that would work for both.
A design agency developed four possible creative routes. Split Second Research ran implicit testing across all four routes. The idea is simple even if the method isn’t: instead of asking people what they think, you measure what they actually feel (the instinctive reactions that happen in milliseconds, before conscious reasoning kicks in).
Each participant saw one of the new designs and their responses were compared against a control group seeing the existing branding. This gave a clear read on how each creative shifted perception, emotional connection, and willingness to act.
Both the new logo and taglines outperformed the original, but what was interesting was how.
Younger respondents found the mission clearer, the brand more modern, and responded positively whereas older respondents felt a stronger sense of credibility and emotional connection. Across both groups, intention to participate went up.
RNLI went with Tagline 1. The campaign generated seven times the donation response rate they’d hoped for, and because a larger supporter base directly drives income, that uplift mattered beyond the campaign itself. That’s the difference implicit testing makes.
FROM THE CLIENT
When UK legislation changed to require active opt-in for marketing communications, RNLI faced more than a compliance question. They saw an opportunity to revisit their logo and tagline, and
King’s Favour was winning blind tastings. Regular drinkers consistently rated it ahead of other wines in the category, so the quality was there, but you wouldn’t have known it from the shelf price or the way the bottle sat among its competitors.
The brand team started wondering: was the wine actually the problem? Or was the packaging just failing to keep up with what was inside?
If it was the latter, there might be an opportunity to update the design, move the price, and not lose a single sale in the process, but
By 2010, the media landscape was moving fast. New digital music channels were emerging, and MTV was picking up an uncomfortable signal from conventional research: surveys and focus groups suggested the brand was losing relevance with