Tasked with promoting Anthem Properties’ latest high-rise, Toolbox Design faced the challenge of connecting the building to its surroundings while making nearby Metrotown, Vancouver, feel welcoming and accessible. Drawing from deep empathy for newcomers’ dreams and aspirations, Toolbox created CITIZEN—a Graphis Advertising Silver award-winning campaign that masterfully balanced the energy of bustling “citi” life against the tranquility of home. With inclusive taglines like “Out of Many, One” and “Make Your Place” and featuring a rich tapestry of generations, cultures, and backgrounds, Toolbox’s human-centered approach transformed traditional promotional content into something more meaningful. Rather than simply advertising a building, they invited diverse audiences to see themselves as active participants in crafting their new Canadian story, turning real estate marketing into an opportunity for belonging and community building.
By: Niko Potton, Creative Director, Toolbox Design
The Project
Anthem Properties’ acquisition of a site steps from the bustling heart of Metrotown, Vancouver, marked a clear commitment to a vision of the future. Situated across a busy transit corridor and within a low-rise neighbourhood, the desirable high-rise development location was tempered by a brief commute or 10-minute walk to the city centre. The challenge was to overcome this imaginary barrier and instill a sense of connection to the neighborhood and community.
The Process
We were inspired by an empathy for our mainly new-to-Canada audience. Their dreams and ambitions. Their hopes for the future and a true sense of home. This outlook informed the strategic approach. The market status quo was our inflection point, where deeply understanding the ambitions of our audience informed a nuanced perspective, sensitive to their aspirations and emotional vulnerabilities with building a life in an unfamiliar place. Enter, CITIZEN. A pulsating life through CITI, coupled with the harmonious peace of ZEN. This exciting duality created a new visual and storytelling dialect based on emotion before transaction. Personality before product left room for a phased approach that resonated with our audience, demonstrated by reflecting a cross-section of the community back to themselves: generations and cultures, diversity and belonging, arts and energy captured in mirroring contexts. “Out of Many, One” and “Make Your Place” celebrated and invited our audience to participate and feel welcome, and importantly, an empowered, not passive, participant.
The Impact
This people-first hierarchy sparked a fundamental strategic shift in Anthem Properties’ marketing approach. Establishing an emotional connection before any product calculation is a calculated risk and potentially a cloudy ROI return. Yet, proof-of-concept lay with the overwhelming positive industry preview and public presentation centre opening, providing a clear real-world indication of a successful engagement with a willing audience in ways that connect deeply.
This positive response further underlined our instincts of human-centric when engaging on behalf of a greater product equation, and established a method we employ on further projects.
The Creative Journey
The clear distinction of successfully establishing an emotional connection before the product is a rewarding outcome on the project and an endorsement for different thinking. We moved into an unproven space with our approach, enfolding our client into our process and having them support and embrace it to move forward as a team. The conceptual nature of everything from the name, visual approach, language, and storytelling was executed seamlessly across multiple types of media while retaining a singular vision, and the enthusiastic interest generated was a satisfying outcome to an inspiring opportunity.
Strategies for leaders, design for dreamers: Toolbox Design is an independent design and strategy agency based in Vancouver. For three decades, we’ve made vivid, hard-working brand creative for hotels and resorts, real estate communities, retail icons, food and beverage, and packaged goods – a universe of business challenges.
