When Malcolm Booth arrived at the R&A in 2007, the organization that runs the British Open didn’t have much of a marketing, branding or communications capability. The R&A was formed to write and administer the rules of golf, and that’s largely what it did.
That began to change in the last few years as Booth, from within, and outside agencies inspected the British Open’s brand identity, which has evolved from the tournament’s beginning 154 years ago.
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The new British Open logo, brand identity keep the claret jug as centerpiece.
Photo by: COURTESY OF THE R&A
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The image of the Open has always been the coveted claret jug, but the R&A set out to redefine how to market the Open’s brand.
“The Open Championship’s branding has really been an evolutionary process, so we took this opportunity to hit the reset button,” said Booth, the R&A’s director of communications and a former marketing manager for Titleist. “Ultimately, we were looking to create a mark that would be the calling card for the championship.”
The R&A culminated a three-year rebranding process earlier this month when it released a series of new marks designed to identify the British Open for years to come.
Teamup, a London brand firm founded by American Fred Popp, worked with its design partner, Designwerk, to create the new logos. Those marks will be used in all of the Open’s communications and marketing materials, as well as the branding around the golf course during the tournament.
While the release of the new marks wrapped up the creative process, the R&A had been studying the Open’s brand identities for nearly three years. It started when the R&A hired the U.K. division of Kantar Media, a market research firm, to survey nearly 4,000 fans and deliver the Open’s brand position and redefine its communication strategy.
“In the past, the big focus of the brand had been on the golf course and the most recent champion,” Booth said. “But that distilled down the brand of the championship itself. So one of our objectives became, ‘How do we tell the story of the championship more so than any one champion or venue?’ A consistent theme moving forward will be to keep the Open Championship itself in sharp focus.”
The new marks still use the claret jug as the centerpiece, but it is incorporated into a larger “O” to give the Open a much more modernized look.
“The logo is a timeless combination of the best of what’s come before,” Popp wrote in an email. “An open design, emphasis in the word OPEN, a peelable treatment of the Claret Jug within the ‘O’ and a heritage font.”
Popp said up to 10 members of the Teamup and Designwerk firms worked on the design for close to a year. Seven logos were chosen by the firms and the R&A to be tested by focus groups before the final pick was made.
Because the Open Championship has such a global following, several foreign-language versions of the logo, as well as local-language tool kits, were created.
“The reverence and love of the championship is strong the world over and there is an appreciation for the heritage,” Booth said. “This was the first open competition in any sport. But some of the terminology didn’t translate well the farther you got from the U.K.”
