A Landerlander framework

Heroika
for Placemaking

What kind of destination is your place?

Open the full template on Miroverse ↗

Heroika is a brand and communications strategy framework that turns places into destinations. With storytelling at its core, it creates sustainable, humane destination brands — for new venues, relaunches and any place trying to become somewhere people plan to visit on purpose.

Use the template on Miroverse independently, or run it as a facilitated workshop with us. Either way, you leave with a strategy you can act on the next day.

Open in Miroverse
What it does

It helps places attract visitors and bring them back.

Heroika gives you and your team the tools and skills to talk to your audiences through the power of storytelling. It works for museums, galleries, immersive attractions, mixed-use spaces, neighbourhoods and destinations. If you know what your place is about — or what you'd like it to become — Heroika will help you attract visitors, manage their expectations and increase repeat visits by talking to your audience properly.

The brands it produces are sustainable — because strategies created through Heroika contain simple, universally understandable sets of rules, brand behaviours, that anyone can implement. With a Heroika strategy you always know what to do, even if you don't have a plan yet.

They are also humane — because Heroika builds your place as a living character that audiences can relate to and fall in love with.

For startups and single-product brands, there's a sibling version: Heroika for Brand Strategy.

What you get

Three things you can act on immediately.

Allow several hours to a couple of days depending on the number of stakeholders at the table. When you're done, the next steps get easier: briefing designers, building your website, planning openings and campaigns, scheduling activations across the year.

01
Brand Saga Your place brand strategy in one paragraph — a single, shareable articulation of who you are, who you're for and why it matters.
02
Content Strategy Worked story examples for each SPOT behaviour, connected to your communications and sales funnel.
03
Communications Strategy A year-long timeline of events, channels and audiences. Internal and external beats mapped so nothing gets left to chance.
How it works

A journey from a place on a map to a destination.

Four stages, each building on the last. The first two produce your brand strategy; the second two turn it into a content and communications plan you can execute straight away.

01

World — Briefing

Who is your place in the world that surrounds it?

Start with the human problem your place solves or the need it fulfils. Then map the world your place lives in: visitors, competitors, allies, regulators, the forces that shape your reception. A place without a clearly defined world stays undefined itself.

02

SWOT→SPOT — Brand Strategy

Looking at your world, you'll build a SWOT matrix. Then you transform it using our simple transformation tool, SWOT→SPOT. The familiar matrix of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats becomes your place's SPOT behaviour matrix — four verbs that become the foundation of your brand.

Behaviours, not labels. A place that serves, polishes, obtains and tackles can be designed, staffed, programmed and communicated. A place described by labels just stands there.

S
Serve your visitors
Strengths become acts of service. What you do best, you do in plain sight.
P
Polish your weaknesses
Weaknesses become a commitment to improvement — visible, honest and ongoing.
O
Obtain new opportunities
Opportunities become active pursuit — partnerships, programmes, new audiences.
T
Tackle what stands in your way
Threats become the fights your place picks on visitors' behalf.
03

Stories — Content Strategy

Each SPOT behaviour produces its own kind of story. Stories are channel-agnostic — a good Serve story works as a TikTok, a press release, a tour guide line or a poster.

  • Serve stories show a visitor meeting a need that your place answers
  • Polish stories show how your place is getting better
  • Obtain stories share milestones, partnerships and new programmes
  • Tackle stories take on the bigger fights your place picks on visitors' behalf
04

Journey — Communications Strategy

Match your stories to your calendar. Internal events — openings, programme launches, anniversaries — and external events — holidays, seasons, festivals, industry moments — become the buttresses of your year. Your stories build on these buttresses across your audience's channels.

Case study Readles, Dubai Mall

Readles is the world's first AI-reimagined museum — six halls of global fairy tales, from Cinderella and Aladdin to Arab folklore, inside Dubai Mall's Zabeel extension. A new kind of venue with no existing audience, needing to earn its place from day one.

Inside Readles — immersive fairy tale hall at Dubai Mall Inside Readles — mermaid hall at Dubai Mall
Image source: Readles Instagram

Together with colleagues from UNMUTE, a cultural growth agency, we ran Heroika with the founding team. The workshop produced a Brand Saga, four named story types, a year-long calendar with five comms phases and a digital plan mapped to 200 paying visitors a day by month two.

Readles Heroika workshop — brand strategy board in Miro

Smaller venues use a lighter version of the same framework. Same backbone, same outputs, scaled to the place.

Visit readles.com →
FAQ

We want to do it on our own. Is it ok?

By all means! Heroika is free for your own use. If you would like to run a Heroika workshop for someone else, contact Victor at victor@landerlander.com.

How do I sign up for a workshop?

Start with a 30-minute introductory call. Schedule it here.

Can you make us a bespoke strategy?

Yes. Email hello@landerlander.com. If you've already gone through Heroika and have your Brand Saga, there's a discount.

Does it work for cities or neighbourhoods, not just single venues?

Yes. The bigger the place, the more time we spend on the World stage mapping the forces around it. The SPOT, Stories and Journey stages work the same regardless of scale.

Get in touch

Let's have a chat.

We'd love to hear about your place and explore how we can make it irresistible.

Anastasia Lander
+44 7957 114873
anastasia@landerlander.com
Victor Lander
+44 7957 114963
victor@landerlander.com
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