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Putting Aotearoa into the NZ Police
Project Type
Branding & Rollout
Due its British colonel origins from over 180 years ago, the New Zealand Police lacked a brand and tone of voice that was truly reflective of a Kiwi organisation. Not only that, but the time had come to fully incorporate tikanga Māori helping connect better with all New Zealander’s in a relevant and modern way.
Easier said than done considering the many stakeholders and nearly 15,000 employees. There were a lot of hoops to jump through. The brief was to rebuild the New Zealand Police brand, freshen the tone of voice and communications, and to enable the organisation to be more relevant to the wider community.
We saw the need for every touch-point of New Zealand Police (and all communications) to be analised and updated. The koru - new life, and tukutuku patterns - created through sharing, are key design features symbolising life, unity and community connection.
This narrative informed the entire visual identity and integrated Te Reo Māori into much of the communication with prominence and pride alongside english. The application and roll out was vast and took nearly 3 years to complete - including the website, signage & way finding, vehicle fleets (helicopters, tractors, cars, utes, jet ski’s and boats including the full fleet of regular police cars), customised local station refreshes, collateral and advertising comms. This is now a cohesive design system for Police to display their commitment to the Māori language and Tiriti O Waitangi while being contemporary and more relevant for generations to come. This empowers Police toward one of their key values; partnering with Māori and reflecting all Aotearoa.
The campaign and brand rollout was so successful that the Police saw a huge increase in new cops applying for training, including Maori, Pacific, and Asian, (in fact the new cops recruitment targets were realised 24 hours after the campaign went to air) and the brand gained ongoing and much needed nationwide and local community support and respect. We helped place Aotearoa back into the New Zealand Police.
