‘Brands must do more than posturing’

That applies a more positive spin on cost reduction, repositioning the initiative as a more responsible ethical story, Eyles tells Shubhomoy Sikdar

Can brand design enhance credibility among potential consumers? Especially when there are hundreds of brands and thousands of influencers online...

Design is a complex, yet critical component when it comes to building a brand. Your visual becomes your silent identity, working to promote your brand through elements such as design, colours, symbols and words, effectively put together to uniquely differentiate you from your competitors. Going beyond aesthetic and functional values, a great brand design will step up to reflect what the brand stands for — crisply delivering the message while emotionally hooking the consumer.

Is the customer touch point, and the corresponding clutter, also kept in mind in creating design solutions?

The “clutter” is the key challenge to navigate on a crowded shelf, and great brand managers build design solutions to ensure their products can stand to engage new customers and are sticky for existing ones, keeping them within the walls of the franchise. Our client Sinebrychoff, a Finnish Brewery and a market leader in the category, for instance, engaged us recently to rebrand its flagship beer Koff. Now craft beer is a growing market segment in Finland. Which is why even though Koff beer in Finland is widely popular and known as the country's “first” beer, the brand needs to stay on top of its marketing efforts to counter the rising competition. We developed a quirky creative design to resonate with the optimistic Finnish target audience. The end result was an offbeat design that stood out in the clutter on the shelf to appeal to consumers who value independence and quality.

Closer home, tell us something about your work for Britannia Treat whose sales purportedly rose 80 per cent since its repackaging and redesigning.

The defining of a company’s goals or personality, which is foundational to all branding and designing processes, is actually set by the company and not the designer. We designed the repositioning keeping in mind the brand’s message of “Exciting Goodness” in place. With the vital directives in place, the repositioning targeting a broader demographic with a proposition of “the fun in between” landed successfully with the consumer base. The refreshed identity and variant innovation pushed brand awareness from 85 per cent preredesign to 98 per cent, with 80 per cent of consumers stating they bought the brand as a result of the new packaging. Repackaging and redesigning are powerful tools which when done right do have the power to unleash the impact they did in Britannia’s case — growing household penetration by 96 per cent as volumes more than doubled.

How do you ensure that creative pursuits and business goals harmonise during a brand-design revamp exercise?

If the design of the brand is not aligned with the message the brand wants to deliver, the natural risk of course is that you will confuse the consumer on what they should expect and, as a result, fail to connect with them. The brand’s purpose, positioning and personality, all elements drive the designing of its visual identity. Any brand design exercise follows carefully constructed strategies after understanding the company, the management goals, product’s purpose and target audience. Forensic immersion into the consumer mindset, their challenges, aspirations, expectations — and their relationship with your business objective — all these ensure that your creative output is aligned to insights and strategic rigour, ensuring the smooth fusion of science and art. Incorporating this essence into tangible design elements and carefully selected nomenclature is critical to the design process, and invariably results in stunningly consumercentric creative, that most importantly drives tangible commercial results.

Since communication is no longer a one-way street in the modern era, are customer preferences of brands (especially the ones with a certain legacy) taken into consideration while a redesign is in the works?

When iconic brands go for redesigning to reposition themselves, the underlying objective is always grabbing a larger market share. The tightrope that many legacy brands walk to reach new customers while holding on to the hard-earned brand-love requires keeping customer preferences in mind while redesigning and also while understanding what are the incumbent elements of a brand that you can move forward with and what elements are best to let go of. Straying too far from what has been familiar could be risky. However, not being brave in a market of fierce competition can be detrimental too.