The brief was a rebrand.
But this was the start of a new era.
The Perth Wildcats were moving into a significant new chapter. New ownership. New leadership. New ambition.
The club’s identity had served it for more than 20 years, but it no longer matched where the organisation wanted to go or the expectations of a modern, digital-first sporting audience.
Hum was initially brought in to help evolve the brand. It quickly became clear that changing the logo alone would be nowhere near enough.
The Challenge
The Wildcats weren’t simply changing how they looked. They needed greater clarity around what the club wanted to become and what that meant for the people inside it and the community around it.
The brand had to work across very different audiences: players, staff, members, fans, partners and the broader Western Australian public. It also needed to respect decades of history without allowing that history to constrain the next era.
Before any visual work began, Hum worked with leadership and listened closely to the people who had the most invested in the brand. A comprehensive fan survey helped establish what supporters valued, what needed protecting and where they were ready to see the club change.
The task was bigger than refreshing an identity. It was aligning the club around an ambition the new brand could genuinely represent.
The Insight
The Wildcats had always meant more to their supporters than basketball alone. They represented Western Australia, a fiercely loyal fan community and a sense of belonging that extended beyond what happened on court.
That gave us a much larger strategic territory. The opportunity wasn’t simply to modernise a basketball brand. It was to recognise and deliberately build on the wider cultural role the Wildcats could play in WA.
BIGGER THAN BASKETBALL
It wasn’t a campaign line. It was a direction for the organisation, giving the club a clearer lens for decisions across culture, brand, community, commercial growth and the experience it wanted to create around the team.
Hum’s Role
Hum worked from the inside out, helping the club establish the strategic foundations before translating them into brand expression.
The engagement extended across leadership and culture, brand strategy, audience insight, identity development, campaign thinking and senior marketing support through launch. Importantly, the strategy and creative development stayed connected. The identity wasn’t designed first and rationalised afterwards. Each element needed to reinforce what the club had decided it wanted to become.
The Brand Platform
If Bigger than Basketball was the internal ambition, the external brand needed an idea capable of bringing it to life.
WELCOME TOWILDNATION
The platform drew from something unmistakably Western Australian: wild landscapes, wild conditions, fierce pride and the character of the people who call the state home.
Wildnation gave the Red Army and the broader community something larger to belong to, while creating a flexible creative platform the club could use across campaigns, merchandise, content, media and match day.
The brand was then rebuilt as a system around that idea, including a modernised logo, distinctive typography, numbers, texture, playing apparel and merchandise designed to work across digital, broadcast and physical environments.
The Work
Welcome to Wildnation launched as a major campaign designed to make the club’s new era impossible to miss.
The idea moved across outdoor, radio, digital, content, partnerships and fan communications, supported by a media strategy designed to make the investment work as hard as possible.
Hum stayed involved beyond the strategy and identity, providing senior marketing leadership through campaign and media planning, partner collaboration and launch execution. That continuity mattered. The thinking that created the brand remained present as it entered the market.
The Outcome
The transformation delivered more than attention. In the first quarter following launch:
- 30%Merchandise revenue increased 30% year on year
- 19%Ticketing revenue increased 19% year on year across the first three home games
- 3%Membership revenue increased 3% year on year
The club also entered the season with a clearer ambition, a refreshed identity and a platform capable of carrying the Wildcats well beyond a single campaign.
What began as a rebrand became something much more valuable: alignment between where the organisation wanted to go and the brand it was putting into the world.
Has your business outgrown the brand around it?
Hum helps businesses work out whether the issue is really identity, or whether something deeper inside the business needs to become clear first.
Book a diagnostic call