To make sure any new concepts would win fans’ and sponsors’ approval, we undertook with the club a major consultation exercise, using face-to-face and online tools to keep fans in the picture at every stage, and to get real buy-in for the development of a key aspect of The People’s Club.

With the club, we developed three distinct phases of consultation and creative development and testing.

There was a need for change, and the club was determined to do things properly – while we carried out wide research, and refined key considerations around implementation of the new crest.

Time was tight, and we told fans that they would be having their say on the new crest, within a few days of starting the whole process.

To see what they really thought, we carried out 21 Focus Groups and 30 in depth interviews amongst the Everton ‘family’ – and emailed and consulted 300,000 fans, who responded with more than 20,000 online submissions.

We took all that feedback and distilled it into three new crest creative concept proposals which were duly (less than a month after the process started) put to the fans’ vote.

Around 13,000 fans voted using a secure system to ensure ‘purity’, and after a couple of weeks their choice was unveiled and adopted.

A real result for the fans and the club…