Lincolnshire Co-op
The challenge
Lincolnshire Co-op needed a recruitment brand that could compete with better-known national employers. Its breadth of roles – from food retail and pharmacy to funeral services, travel and support functions – brought the added challenge of building a single story that would resonate across the business. Epix needed to uncover what genuinely distinguished the employee experience and turn it into a clear, credible careers proposition.
Differentiate and compete with larger national employers
Ground the proposition in authentic colleague experiences
Unite a diverse workforce without oversimplifying the employee experience
“ Honestly, it’s amazing and I can’t thank Eploy and Epix enough! ”
Matt Brown
| Lincolnshire Co-op
The insights
A detailed research phase, including interviews with colleagues across the business, showed that Lincolnshire Co-op’s sense of community was experienced through everyday relationships and practical support. Colleagues described knowing their customers, helping neighbouring branches, being trusted to make decisions and feeling that their work contributed to something locally important. The strongest employer story was not simply about “purpose”, but about the combination of human connection, autonomy and being part of a team.
Progression proved more nuanced than simply climbing the ladder. Some people had moved rapidly across roles because managers spotted their potential and opened doors; others valued stability, flexibility and the freedom to build a job around family, health or caring responsibilities. Both were valid forms of growth and needed to come through in our work.
The opportunity was to turn broad values into believable proof: support you can call on, contributions that are noticed and work that matters close to home.
We shaped these into five employer values, Purpose, Progress, Pride, People and Place, and used them as the thread through everything that followed.
Finding the right tone of voice
We ran a half-day discovery workshop with the team, exploring Lincolnshire Co-op’s history, values and the way they wanted candidates to feel.
From there, we shaped a voice that sounds genuinely like Lincolnshire Co-op: warm, straightforward and never corporate. We captured the principles in a practical set of tone of voice guidelines, giving the team a clear framework for writing consistently across every candidate touchpoint.
Developing the employer brand
The research gave us a clear creative brief: make community tangible, represent different ideas of career success and create a brand capable of bringing a remarkably varied organisation together. Rather than relying on broad claims, the identity needed to reflect the warmth, support and individuality colleagues experienced in their everyday working lives. From this, we developed Working, differently – an employer brand platform that celebrates the different roles, ambitions and lives found across Lincolnshire Co-op.
We translated the idea into a warm and flexible visual identity, introducing a distinctive colour palette, flowing ribbon graphics and colleague name badges. The system gave the brand energy and personality while remaining adaptable enough to work across everything from food retail and pharmacy to funeral services, travel and support functions.
The result was an identity that felt connected without becoming uniform: one employer brand, designed to make space for the many different people and experiences within it.
Bringing the brand to life online
The same warmth and personality needed to come through visually, not only in the words.
We designed the careers website around the new colour palette, ribbon graphics and name badge devices, creating a consistent experience wherever a candidate lands. The ribbons introduce warmth and movement without overwhelming the content, while the name badges connect testimonials to real colleagues rather than presenting them as anonymous quotes.
These small but deliberate choices make the experience feel human, coherent and unmistakably Lincolnshire Co-op.
“ Thank you Zoe and all the team at Epix Media - their work has been a huge part of getting us to this point, and it's been great collaborating with them throughout – one of the easiest & nicest creative partners we’ve ever had. ”
Laurence Alexander
| Eploy
Putting colleagues in the picture
To bring the brand to life, we photographed colleagues from across the business in their own workplaces, capturing the people, environments and everyday interactions that make Lincolnshire Co-op distinctive.
Alongside this documentary-style photography, we shot a series of studio portraits to form the basis of our hero imagery. Together, the two approaches created a flexible image library for the careers website, recruitment campaigns and future employer brand communications.
Most importantly, the brand is represented by the colleagues who genuinely make up the business, keeping authenticity at the heart of the identity.
A brand built to last
We brought the strategy, creative themes, tone of voice, messaging, colours, typography, icons and photography style together in a comprehensive employer brand playbook.
The playbook was delivered alongside a complete library of creative assets, giving the Lincolnshire Co-op team everything they needed to apply the brand consistently and confidently. Rather than creating a campaign that depended on us to maintain it, we built a practical system the internal team could continue using long after launch.
