Jo Duffy. Senior Copywriter, Editor & Content Lead.

The Brief

To come up with the name and brand identity for a new PegasusLife development, restaurant and spa located in Bath, then write all marketing collateral, including national print ads, the development website and a 70 page brochure.

The Collateral

During the conceptual stages of creating the identity for Norfolk Place, I drew heavily upon the city of Bath itself for inspiration, paying particular attention to its long history as a spa destination and its tradition of leading modern thinking and practice on health and wellbeing. I researched current models of wellbeing as being physical, emotional, mental and spiritual as a central concept for what was on offer at the development, in terms of both facilities (café, spa, gym) and way of life (sociable, active, relaxed). For the naming of the development, I suggested various different Roman gods and goddesses of healing. It was initially named 'Monmouth Terrace' after Sir Geoffery of Monmouth, but was changed to Norfolk Place (a homage to the Norfolk Mill which once stood on the site) in the later stages of the campaign due to a complication with planning permission. 

When writing the early marketing collateral, I also focussed on Bath’s history as a magnet for high society and it’s appearance in classic literature, using the Jane Austen quote ‘Oh! Who could ever be tired of Bath?’ both as the tagline in the initial round of print ads for the development, and in the leaflet and brochure as a title when introducing information about Bath.

The ToV throughout the written collateral drew occasionally on the language of health and wellness, without slipping into cliché. Meanwhile my extensive research on the wellness history of Bath (stretching back to pre-Roman times) was intertwined throughout the narrative, and eventually also included in a detailed written and visual timeline in the final brochure.

I also wrote the website, which you can view here.

The Brief

To plan, paginate and write a brochure of approximately seventy pages for PegasusLife’s new development, Holmwood, located in the New Forest. The brochure needed to do more than sell the product: it needed to tell an aspirational story of the way of life at this development, and delve into the culture and history of the area in a compelling way.

The Brochure

Having already led the naming and brand identity of this development, I decided early on which elements we should emphasise and expand on throughout the brochure: the mythology and folklore of the New Forest, the crossover between the domesticity of the village life and the adventures on offer in the forest, and the natural beauty of the landscape. We’d commissioned a series of photographs of the New Forest from the British landscape photographer Harry Cory Wright; because they were so beautiful and I wanted as many as possible included, I proposed we also create a separate editorial booklet to be included as a brochure insert. This booklet allowed us to showcase the images in more detail, and included an interview that I conducted with Harry about his photography practice, as well as a ‘behind the scenes’ feature about the shoot.

The Brief

Create a campaign to uniquely target PegasusLife's key demographic: those who are reaching retirement age but are still active, sociable, and likely to dismiss the more patronising or generic retirement living options on the market. 

The Campaign

In the concept stages of the campaign, we hinged all ideas around one key question: who are the people we’re targeting really? When were they born? What have they experienced? How has it shaped them? I soon realised that today’s ‘new generation’ of retirees were also once the ‘new generation’ behind many of the cultural, political and musical movements of the sixties and seventies – people who had pioneered enormous social change, not content to settle for the austere, post-war status quo. In the ad copy, I tied this rejection of old norms back then to a refusal to settle for the drab old norms in retirement now. We paired this with archived images from the era in which they were young: the first ever Glastonbury festival, an anti-apartheid protest, a women’s rights march.

The campaign was released in September 2017. The ads ran for a month, in publications such as The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and The Evening Standard. 

The Brief

To produce all welcome pack and onsite collateral for Helicon, a property management company that operates across all PegasusLife developments in the UK. This included comprehensive welcome guides for residents, guest suite guides, newsletter templates for staff, onsite spa handbooks and treatment menus, restaurant menus, service directories and branded stationary.

The Collateral

As Helicon was a brand new company, I was first responsible for developing their ToV and writing up brand guidelines for its usage across both on and offline collateral. Helicon’s aim was to be a different type of property management company – transparent, friendly, and available to help at anytime. The collateral reflected this, balancing a friendly, approachable tone with functional, instructive information about each of the developments, and all the services available.

The Brief

I was commissioned to take part in a writing challenge as part of Marie Claire’s #BreakFree campaign on body positivity. The challenge was to write a poem around how I interpreted the phrase ‘permanently imperfect’ in relation to my own body image.

The Poem

I used the poem to explore the dominant critical language around female bodies, the social landscape that informs how we learn to speak it, and how we might subvert it. Structured in three stanzas, I juxtaposed the way I’d despised some of my own features as a teen with my developing acceptance of them.  You can read the full poem here.

The Brief

To research, write, proof and copy-edit engaging, SEO-friendly digital travel guides for more than 30 destinations sold by Western & Oriental, and upload each one to the CMS with appropriate accompanying images.

The Guides

I wrote functional and informative guides for each country in which W&O sold tours, researching each country thoroughly beforehand, and including ‘Top 10’ highlight lists for groups, families and couples. The guides followed a set structure, however after doing some competitor research I suggested some minor changes based on what seemed to be working on sites like Thomas Cook. These were well received and implemented.

The Brief

To write product-centred ads for Royal Wharf, a new development of 20,000 homes by the Thames, to run in the London press and property publications.

The Ads

The developers of Royal Wharf were keen to emphasise its credentials as a new community for London first and foremost, complete with a newly built high street, shops and a leisure complex, as well as thousands of new homes. The ads had to balance this with also being product-focussed, so in the tagline copy I tied together the ideas of tradition (i.e. a close-knit community, the Georgian style of the town houses) and innovation, before listing the unique features of the development in a more punchy, product-led way.

The Brief

Regularly update the in-house W&O blog with posts focussing on the different countries and destinations we sold, relevant industry news, travelogue reviews and travel advice.

The Blog Posts

I wrote engaging, search engine optimised blog posts, targeted towards a luxury traveller demographic and covering a variety of destinations. Where possible, I planned and scheduled each post to tie-in with relevant company sales promotions or wider trends within the industry.