One Middle Road
It's about time
Project Overview
Chadstone Shopping Centre, known colloquially as ‘Chaddy’ is the biggest shopping centre in Australia and one of the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. Owners Vicinity are committed to innovation and increasing their area of influence in order to grow their audience.
The next phase of transforming the shopping centre into a proper mixed-use precinct was to more closely integrate a new commercial tower within, or in this case, above the shopping centre – giving staff direct access to the centre and increasing the weekday audience for the retailers within the centre. We were engaged to develop the brand, identity and pre-commitment leasing comms.
Project Brief
Convince big corporates that a move to One Middle Road would be better for business, attracting and retaining staff and lead to better productivity because it offers a much better work-life balance. So many corporate C-suites make the ‘new premises’ decision without consulting staff – but staff vote by resigning and moving where they want to work. Now with WFH the new normal, commercial towers have to be places people want to work (not have to work). One of the challenges we had to overcome for Chadstone was that everyone only knew the ‘weekend’ Chadstone (at Christmas), fighting to find a car park, thousands of people, crowded, get-in-get-out. But the weekday Chadstone is completely different, thousands of free car parks, superb wellness precinct, lots of cheap eats, fresh food, supermarkets and a much shorter commute, plus new A-grade plush offices for less than corporates were currently paying. So, cost saving and benefits. All the things that C-suites look for and employees look for, too.
Innovation
Great workplace design is about ensuring that the people who use it love turning up, engage with the workspaces and their colleagues more easily and frequently – and dare we say it – actually find it easy and enjoyable to spend more time at work.
But what if great workplace design didn’t just begin when you arrived at work? What if it could make your whole life better, not just your work life better? A shorter, easy commute, freeing you up to do the school drop off, or an exercise class in the morning. Going against the flow of traffic, cutting stress and saving you a day each week in travel. Moving from hard-to-find expensive daily parking, to plentiful parking that’s free. Transforming your experience of work from have-to, towards want-to. A concierge to make like easy. Easy public transport access, EOT for green commuting, childcare onsite. And flexible, premium A-Grade workspaces, with smart contactless technology that improves safetyand saves both energy and time, improved allowances for fresh airflow, indoor and outdoor meeting, recharging and working spaces.
We needed to paint a compelling picture of a great workplace, not just fit for purpose – but built for exceptional convenience, enhanced wellbeing, productivity, engagement and great business.
Design Challenge
Put the focus on the people, not the product. Sell the benefit, not the attribute. With a diverse spread of audiences, from Tenant agents, C—suite decision makers, through to staff, we needed a bold visual language that conveyed all the benefits of One Middle Road clearly, quickly and boldly. We came up with the positioning ‘Convenient for every you’ and then brought that to life across all the touchpoints necessary to drive awareness, consideration, socialisation, acceptance, take-up and pre-commitment.
Effectiveness
With many Melbourne companies’ workforces used to working from home and reluctant to ‘lose a day a week’ by returning to a daily CBD commute, One Middle Road couldn’t have come at a better time. One Middle Road’s first tenant - leading homewares retailer, Adairs, secured more than 5,500 sqm of combined office and studio space in December 2022, meeting the precommitment threshold. Construction is now underway and due to complete in 2024.
