Yarrila Place
Consumer research | Destination branding | Focus groups and workshops | Logo design | Placenaming
Yarrila Place is Coffs Harbour's new cultural and civic hub. It houses the new gallery and museum space (YAM), a state-of-the-art library, the City of Coffs Harbour council's administration and customer service offices, as well as several public spaces and cafes.
It is Coffs Harbour's biggest cultural commitment in the city's history, and one of the biggest infrastructure projects in decades.
We were tasked with its name and branding.
What's in a name?
In the last decade or so, cities' civic and cultural spaces have become destinations (requiring destination brands) in their own right.
Where once an Australian destination of a civic nature might have been given a dependable if not especially imaginative name like the Coffs Harbour Civic Building, modern destination branding and place naming demands more of its moniker.
It has to excite. It has to intrigue. It has to communicate its purpose. It has to complete.
A good name for the new Coffs Harbour cultural and civic building should both reflect and build on the heritage, culture and identity of its site, and in turn make it distinctive and memorable for residents and for the wider community.
It must be unifying. It must encourage common ground across different interests, get buy-in from all sectors of the community, and build a shared identity.
It must be marketable. It must create a destination for clearly identifiable target audiences and interests, communicate its strengths and benefits, and be a flagship and foundation that sets a standard for other businesses to follow.
It must be aspirational. It must be a point of pride and advocacy for all Coffs' citizens. It must encourage respect, recognition and loyalty. It must correct out of date perceptions and present a vision forward. It must unlock the social and cultural DNA of Coffs Harbour. So...
What name can do all that?
A variety of voices
The cultural and civic space has a number of hats to wear.
First and foremost are the institutions within: the art gallery, the regional museum, the library and council customer service and offices.
Less obvious are the roles it plays as an anchor to the downtown in the city activation program; as a benchmark and landmrk for local businesses to align with; as a symbol of progress and growth; as a message of cultural values.
But how does the general population see it? Do they value libraries? Are cultural institutions important? Can they see the cultural and civic space as part of Coffs' future? What does the future look like?
To get to the bottom of these questions – and in so doing align any potential names with the qualities cited by residents as important – we staged a number of workshops drawing participants from the general population, and specialised workshops drawing participants from the various indigenous clans of the Gumbaynggirr nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which greater Coffs Harbour is sited.
The workshops were specifically designed and facilitated to encourage abstract and associative thinking such that we captured the idea of what an appropriate name might be, what it should represent, what values it should project.
The workshops were designed to make participants think about the individual institutions, the building as a whole, Coffs as a city, and how all these elements interrelate.
From lateral thinking to literal thinking, the workshops then ask the paticipants to apply these associative concepts to potential names of their own inception, names that could capture or signify the essence of previously explored qualities and values.
The data gathered from the workshops was further quantified and qualified via a ballot box questionnaire hosted in several of Council's buildings, and a Facebook-hosted Have Your Say page.
Learning, meeting, sharing,
All data gathered from the workshops, Have Your Say forum and ballot boxes were recorded and collated.
As a result, 1450 keywords were identified as "meaningful", 'important" or "significant".
With very minor editing — merely to align variations of vocabulary such as aligning "telling stories" with "storytelling" — we can process the actual words participants used in response to the various prompts in the workshop sessions.
This, in turn, gives an insight into how a name for the cultural and civic space building might be framed.
"Learning" was the word most used and most frequently identified as "meaningful", "important" or "significant".
Other frequently used words include: community, indigenous, meeting place, history, storytelling, knowledge, culture, sharing, creative and safe place.
Creativity, culture, community
To further analyse the data, we grouped similar keywords into 16 broader categories: while "Learning" was a very strong keyword on its own, how did it rank when concepts were clustered together as a conceptual bloc? In this context, for instance, the consolidated cluster of "Learning, education and storytelling" dropped down to 5th rank with "Creativity and colour" claiming first place amongst these thematic groups.
Very roughly speaking, the top 10 clusters were consistent with a top 10 keywords.
Searching for Sinatra: a name that sings must also sell
From the workshops and other sources of data and anecdote we found, among other things, that a fitting name for the cultural and civic space building would encompass notions of learning, community, creativity and identity, and that a name of Gumbaynggirr origin would be highly regarded.
By and large those are emotional responses to the question of "What name?" — valid of course, but there are also practical elements to the "right name" that must be considered.
We elicited 185 potential names from the workshops, Have Your Say survey and the ballot boxes, one-on-one conversations with key stakeholders, as well as our own independent input. We narrowed down this pool of names to present to the project working group, who then selected the final three names for recommending to the project board.
Through that process we considered practicalities such as: Is it easy to say and spell (a particular obstacle for some Gumbaynggirr words)? Is it distinctive and not used elsewhere? Can it be shortened (as Aussies will) and what might it be shortened to? Does it fit easily in signage and conversation? Is it marketable and can it act as a marketing springboard to other institutions and activities? Is it timeless or will it date before the paint is dry?
Our over-riding yardstick was this: that the best name will meet its emotional obligations to the community it represents, as well as addressing the practical needs of salability support and sustainability.
Practical magic: beyond emotion
Generally speaking destination branding and place naming can just be about a moniker that sounds cool, or that appeals to specific or narrow criteria.
It must meet a number of practical challenges to ensure popularity, longevity and marketability.
Giinagay. Welcome to Yarrila Place
Illuminate / Brighten / Light up / Illustrate
YAAR-rilla
Yarrila (YAAR-rilla) is a Gumbaynggirr word meaning to illuminate, to brighten, to light up or illustrate.
Among three other words of Gumbaynggirr origin, Yarrila was an immediately popular and apt choice. In the context of the civic and cultural hub, what is now known as Yarrila Place, it speaks to the "illumination" of knowledge and learning, to explain or clarify, to light the way.
It also hints at the light reflected from the ceramic foils of the building itself and, if we can push the metaphor, the integrated oculus which brightens the internal atrium.
Muurrbay Language and Culture Cooperative and the Yandarra Committee were consulted to ensure the integrity, sensitivity and spelling of the proposed name.
The process was an involved one; however, the aptness and popularity of the name is testament to the importance of research, data, local knowlege and community involvement when civic branding issues are considered.
A name is often more than just a name.
