Bab Masr — Egypt’s gate to the future

Context

Bab Masr is Egypt’s Gate to the Future

For over 30 centuries, Egypt was the world’s greatest civilization. Now, 21 centuries into the modern era, Egypt is opening a gate to a new world epicentre for the next 100 years.

Welcome to Bab Masr, Egypt’s gate to the future. This was the context for this ambitious project, which aims to highlight the development potential of the north-eastern region of Egypt, and position the country at the heart of global and regional economic, tourism, and trade transformations.

Challenge

How to communicate a giga project?

Bab Masr is composed of 280 projects complementary to each other, which are at different stages of development, allocated to different ministries, in different sectors of activity, in different geographical areas in Northwest Egypt, and in deep connection with neighbouring countries.

With multiple dimensions, Bab Masr aims to contribute to a development never seen before in the different regions of the country, its social and business fabrics, as well as the positioning of the country itself before the different regional and global actors. It’s as relevant as it is complex, with a direct impact on the internal and external dimensions of the country. So, what’s the starting point for communicating this project to its different stakeholders? How do you create a unique moment of alignment with the political vision? How do you simplify the message to clarify its greater purpose?

(Place) Branding can be one of the most critical tools in building a place-making project. Branding structures, involves, aligns, expands value, inspires energy. It reveals the intangible and anticipates the tangible. Branding tells a long story in the blink of an eye.

Miguel Viana, CO-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Unlock Brands

Solution

“Can you develop a video for the
presentation of the project?”

It was clear from the beginning that the best way to communicate this vision was to have a legitimate entity be the spokesperson of the message. This is where branding came in. To simplify the message. To visibly structure the project. To clarify the understanding from the different audiences. This led to the development of a structured brand architecture: one project brand plus five regional sub-brands.

A common symbol was created: a formal epicentre, created by five elements, which expands through an endless number of triangles that symbolize the overwhelming number of projects that will make Bab Masr’s vision come true.

The development of the brand architecture contributed to a more fully and accessible understanding of the scale of the project, as well as its complexity. Branding clearly helped to develop Bab Masr’s launch video, which was the request of the original briefing. Since Bab Masr literally means Egypt’s Gate, we created the brand signature “Let the future in” to symbolize the invitation and call to action for the future to come in through the gate.

A message designed to inspire a nation

The storytelling accommodated the different dimensions of the message, being more inspiring and structuring in the main brand, and more concrete and rational in each regional sub-brand. Thus contributing to clarifying both the positioning of the country and of each region. And to project and respect Egypt’s ambitious future and millenary history.

This structuring contributed to the development of content to feed the brand's communication plan. Now that the new brand existed, a powerful and clear story could be told, reaching more effectively all the desired local, regional and global audiences.