Making it Safely through the Startup Jungle.
More than one million people live in our beautiful metropolis, making Cologne Germany’s fourth largest city and the most populated in North Rhine-Westphalia. Cologne’s economy is characterized by long-lasting and profound structural changes. While trade and traffic have been a consistent and stable pillar of the local economy since the Middle Ages, Cologne is regarded as home of the automobile, mechanical engineering, chemical, energy, insurance and media industries today.
The City of Cologne’s Office of Economic Development advises on all questions related to Cologne as a business location, prepares analyses and plans and successfully contributes to the development of the city’s economy. Their consulting services for startups are a crucial part of their portfolio. STARTERCENTER’s team examines business plans, provides information on public funding and financing programs. Step by step it assists many new entrepreneurs on their path toward fulfilling their self-employment dreams and, above all, in doing so sustainably and long-term.
Our mission? To advertise STARTERCENTER’s free support services with a large billboard campaign. The foundation of our creative idea: All entrepreneurs know that it's a real jungle out there. They must carefully consider the legal form of their company, apply for individual financing and support programs and develop coherent and convincing sales and marketing strategies. First steps toward self-employment and the first few years after founding a company in particular are anything but a walk in the park.
Our campaign was designed with these difficulties in mind. Extremely bold, but by no means repulsive, we staged a “Startup Jungle” with illustrations of wild animals. We created three motifs for use on a broad variety of advertising media, sparking measurable success. While the campaign posters decorated Cologne’s urban landscape, the number of daily inquiries (telephone/email) at STARTERCENTER rose from approx. 10 to approx. 80 per day.
