Blue Planet Aquarium
Sharing a passion for oceans & ocean-life for generations to come
Brief
Aspro Parks operate 68 waterparks, amusement parks, aquariums, and zoos across 10 European countries. Each independently managed and branded, allowing the promotion of their unique offerings whilst maintaining shared values as part of the Aspro brand family.
Radiator was chosen to create a suite of sites for their 9 much-loved UK attractions - optimised for search, ticket-sales and up-sell opportunities. The sites had to be centrally managed on the WordPress for streamlined management whilst integrating seamlessly with Vennersys; their 3rd party ticketing, EPoS and visitor management platform.
Before getting into the web-build, we first had to develop a brand strategy and visual identity for Aspro’s flagship attraction in the UK: Chester's Blue Planet Aquarium as well as their Hastings Aquarium.
Solution
Aspro offers fun, engagement and learning in safe and environmentally-friendly parks. Our client is passionate about the animals in their care, helping to generate an emotional connection between visitors and the natural world.
Our branding for Blue Planet and Hastings Aquariums captures these values, with species-ethics research influencing our branding route and resulting in the creation of a species-agnostic brand identity; future-proofed as their species collection evolves.
The central WordPress installation drives all 9 sites - each accessed via a carefully selected theme, combined with bespoke, mix-and-match content modules – offering a flexible and custom approach for each attraction.
This custom approach establishes clear user flows across ticket purchasing, checkout journeys, and group/party bookings. Whilst also prioritising key user actions including promoting live opening times, getting to the aquarium, introducing upsells and Shark Dives.
Aspro's ticketing and CRM platform of choice, Venersys, was tightly woven into our build through a first-of-its-kind Wordpress integration; supporting dynamic ticketing/booking/membership and intelligently forking data securely between all sites and the CRM.
Highlighting the range of species & conservation, the animals and exhibits are structured to educate the user around the animal’s natural habitat, as well as where to find them in the aquarium itself.
Exhibits are ordered to reflect the water cycle – moving downstream from mountains to shore to open ocean, with landing pages including digestible, at-a-glance educational detail, while punchy 'Did you know?' snippets pepper the other areas of the site with fun species facts.
Cascading across the suite of sites, the custom WordPress theme is purposefully sympathetic to attraction-specific reskins as needed, such as for Scotland's famous Deep Sea World, and Oakwood, Wales' biggest theme park.
A central source-of-truth codebase controls the underlying layouts and behaviour for all sites, allowing fixes and enhancements to be quickly rolled-out across all attractions consistently.
Our relationship with Radiator began with an overhaul of our suite of websites across 9 sites and 5 brands. We were immediately impressed with the care and attention the team took to understand what makes us tick, our culture and aspirations. It was therefore a simple decision to extend our partnership into branding for Blue Planet Aquarium – our flagship brand in the UK. The Discovery phase was clearly defined, and our large team of contributors was very well marshalled through to the brand strategy conclusion. The result is a brand identity that defines what we stand for and that emits the key messages of fun, inspiration and awareness – especially vital in today’s world. I can’t praise Team Radiator enough and we are excited about the next phase of our Brand rollout.
Sue Elahio, MBA FCCA, Director Aspro UK, April 2022
