Discover Our Secret Shore: A Brand Strategy for the Coast the Lakes Overshadowed

Cumbria's tourism economy is enormous - £4.6 billion in revenue and 28% of all regional employment in 2024, drawn from 41 million visitors. Almost all of that lands in the same place: the Lake District. Two hundred miles of coastline sit right alongside it, backed by a rigorous viability study and strong stakeholder support, with real potential to become one of the UK's defining scenic touring routes. Cumbria Tourism, working on behalf of Cumberland Council, brought us in to turn that potential into a brand strategy - one confident enough to sit alongside Scotland's North Coast 500 and Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way, and useful enough for the dozens of independent businesses who'd need to bring it to life. The comparators set the bar. The Wild Atlantic Way generates billions in tourism revenue annually and supports well over 100,000 jobs; the North Coast 500 has added tens of millions to the Highland economy. Cumbria's coast had the raw material to do the same - it just didn't have a brand yet.

We started with the evidence, not the identity, and getting under the skin of the brief laid the opportunity bare: genuine strengths in the landscape and stakeholder appetite, undermined by fragmented infrastructure, patchy signage and an uneven visitor offer that left awareness largely confined to the campervan and motorhome crowd. That gap between what the coast deserved and what it was getting became the starting point for everything. From it came the purpose: to connect people with the real, unhurried Cumbrian coastline, and in doing so generate lasting economic and social benefit for the communities that call it home. And a positioning that mattered as much for what it ruled out as what it said - the route doesn't compete with the Lake District, it complements it. Its real competitive set is other long-distance touring routes and emerging coastal destinations, not the friendly neighbour next door. The proposition followed: Discover Our Secret Shore. The coast's problem was never quality, it was visibility - decades in the Lake District's shadow had left it undersold, not undeserving. The line does several things at once: it frames the route as genuinely undiscovered rather than lesser, acknowledges the mainstream attention it's missed out on, and invites the visitor to be the one who seeks it out. A route this long has two audiences to convince, not one, so we built personas for both sides of the brand. On the visitor side: the Slow Traveller, the Active Explorer, the Heritage Seeker and the Family Discoverer - each defined by what draws them to the coast, not just an age bracket. On the delivery side: the accommodation providers, food and drink businesses, attractions, transport operators and local authorities who'd have to put the brand to work day to day, each with their own needs. We talk to both audiences differently, deliberately. The visitor-facing copy invites discovery on their own terms; the version aimed at businesses is more direct - visitors are coming to this coast regardless, the only real question is whether they find you when they get here. Same coastline, same story, two very different reasons to care. Underneath both sits four brand pillars - Wild & Genuine, Slow & Deep, Rooted & Local, Pioneering & Purposeful - treated as structural beliefs rather than marketing lines, with a tone of voice built to match: honest without ever needing to shout, unhurried without drifting, rooted in salt and steel rather than soft-focus nostalgia

The strategy document became the working brief for everything that followed - logo, visual language, tone of voice, the full member toolkit. The Strata colour system carries it through: five colours, one for each stretch of the route, from the tidal flatlands of Morecambe Bay to the wide skies of the Solway Coast, combining within the logo to trace the actual outline of the Cumbrian coastline. Cumbria Tourism now has a brand built on evidence, not just a look. A story that gives the coast's businesses - from B&Bs and farm shops to museums and transport operators - a shared, confident way to tell it, and gives the Cumbria Coastal Route a real shot at joining the ranks of the touring routes it was built to rival.