Pittsburgh nightclub and social club The Body Shop caters to adults specifically partaking in or curious about consensual non-monogamy (CNM). Their mission is to provide a safe, social environment in which their patrons can make new connections and participate to their comfort level, whatever that may be. They approached our team with the goal of using a new identity and brand messaging to increase revenue — by appearing more distinct from their competition, looking more immediately and outwardly inviting, and capturing a sense of fun that, when applied to their special events and outreach programs, would drive foot traffic from new patrons.
A brand for this kind of client can certainly smile and wink, but it shouldn't smirk.
It's not every day you get the opportunity to turn your imagination loose on a brand for a club where people specifically go to have sexual encounters with people other than their spouses and partners. Once the impulsive first urge toward childish humor had passed, the tone in the kickoff meeting quickly became one of excitement and eager creativity. The client was willing to be bold, and here was a category in which you can say and do almost anything. While discussing it, I shared a thought with the team: Our work can certainly smile and wink to capture the client's intended sense of fun, but it shouldn't smirk. People who engage in this lifestyle regularly see it as exactly that — nothing embarrassing, funny, or shameful. If our end product didn't seem to accept its own message as being perfectly normal and acceptable, then the entire thing would fall over.
As my creative partner and I brainstormed, we came up with a name which laid a solid foundation for where we felt we wanted the rest of the project to go: Delight Club. Besides the obvious phonetic wordplay proximity to "the night club," we felt "delight" was the right term for the sense of fun (tinged with sexuality) that would be present in our final direction.
Visually, I took the fun of "delight" in a direction which incorporated illustrated characters. Besides being disarming toward people considering visiting the club (and potentially also the lifestyle) for the first time, an illustrated character has the benefit of allowing someone to see themselves, or a part of themselves, in it. And the more characters you incorporate, the wider the audience that can relate to your messaging. We created a range of characters, designed to stand alone or be paired interchangeably with each other, and even gave them names — a small touch that we found creates an opportunity for each to have a backstory, either overtly invented by us or our client, or inferred somewhere within each viewer's imagination.
Conventionally, clients who engaged our agency for this sort of speculative messaging project received conceptual ads for print, out-of-home, video and radio, and other traditional and mass-market advertising touchpoints. Given the nature of this specific client, we didn't think it was in service to our client to provide these deliverables as they'd never run them, regardless of how compelling they were. So instead, knowing that our client wanted the new branding and messaging to affect their physical spaces within the club as well, we created conceptual interior design as inspiration for where they could take their club in the future.
One of the fun challenges of advertising is putting your mind and imagination in someone else's shoes for a bit to try to tailor messaging to your audience. While CNM isn't something I participate in, I enjoyed the unconventional nature of this project and feel very pleased with the end result. And despite being flagged many times by Midjourney for risqué content while generating the various supporting images to present to the client, my account was not banned; I'll call that a win too.