ACCORDING TO a 2007 Wharton School of Business marketing study, all companies — from major multinationals to startups — face a common challenge. That challenge is how to grow their businesses so they can boost earnings and enhance the value of their shares.
Far too often, however, firms find it difficult to sustain growth because they become risk averse and, as a result, opt for incremental product and service improvements instead of major initiatives. These two improvement ideas have been characterized as competing “small i” innovation versus “BIG I” innovation, respectively.
Incremental but instrumental
A “brand restage” is considered by most as a “small i” innovation versus new product development falling under “BIG I” innovation. But “small i” restage innovations can still lead to powerful strategies that are able to transform a brand that is losing its way and to increase sales above the expected 10% to 12%. The term restage has been defined as enhancement, refresh, redesign, reboot, revitalization, modernization, and sea change.
However we refer to it, the overall goal is to explore, update, and identify new opportunities for an existing brand to become more relevant to current consumers while engaging competitive users at the same time. A consumers’ design landscape is continually evolving, but design alone is only part of a well-crafted restage program, and modernization for modernization’s sake could be missing out on changing consumer attitudes—potentially yielding an under-promised brand story.
The brand success model is an interpersonal process, and consumers are continually in a two-way dialogue with the brands they buy. Today’s consumers want — in fact, demand — open and honest two-way communication with the products they purchase and the companies they trust. Brand loyalty is a mindset that a company must work hard to build, maintain, and hold on to. A brand must be constantly evaluated and reevaluated to ensure that its visual message is adopted by even the most jaded consumer.
Forging a new trajectory
When creating a new design trajectory for an existing brand, there are five steps designers and brand owners should carefully consider before restaging.
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1. Talk with your consumer and the competitive brand user. Determine consumers’ current needs and wants so the brand is redesigned to fulfill consumer expectations of how they want the brand to fit within their world. You may uncover unrecognized emotional needs that have always been present within your targeted group. These needs can be probed further for new positioning and imagery opportunities. The new Midol after design platform shown here is a good example of new emotional needs met by the packaging.
2. Determine the brand’s core equities—both physical and perceived. An existing brand name certainly has the valuable equities needed with which to create a more relevant brand story. Existing brands with strong name recognition are the best candidates, but consumers may have left these brands behind (like old friends) feeling that they don’t have as much in common anymore. It is well-known that not only restaging a brand’s physical characteristics of color, shape, symbol, or words requires careful consideration for findability reasons, but also consumer understanding is required before restaging a brand’s perception.
3. Evaluate the brand’s competition and its category. There may be an opportunity to evolve the brand position so that it falls between existing category paradigms and new category paradigms. The result could potentially be a new category for your brand to not only live in, but to be first in. Challenging entrenched category “rules” can clearly identify restage innovations as well as determine new directions for differentiating your brand from its competition.
4. Reevaluate the brand’s structural components and formulation. Reassessing a package’s structure is a compelling way to engage the consumer, especially when paired with product reformulation that speaks to consumers in new ways. For example, the Campho-Phenique brand uncovered new consumer needs and expanded its formulation from one cold sore product to two cold sore treatment offerings—one for drying action, one for moisturizing action—so that both cold sore stages would be remedied.
5. Create brand imagery. First, the following elements should be determined: a) Brand Equities; b) Brand Position; c) Emotional Benefits; d) Functional Benefits; e) Product Features; f) Brand Personality, Manner, and Tone; and g) Relevant Copy Platform(s). Once those are determined, a design development phase can be initiated so that your targeted consumers will be able to find, understand, and accept your brand’s restage.
Bayer and Yves restaging
Due to the evolving competition of private label aspirin at retail, the problem was not with the Bayer brand’s efficacy — but rather its image. The brand was lost in a crowd of competitors at retail due to a multitude of different colored shields on its primary display panels. It was important to explore and identify new opportunities for the Bayer brand to become more relevant to current consumers as well as to engage competitive users.
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The design reinforced the brand by clearly designing a visual hierarchy of brand first, segmentation/formulation second, and by placing Bayer’s heritage “cross” symbol next to the Bayer logo. This design not only reinforced the brand image, but it also elevated it from a commodity perception. The “Everyday Wonders” positioning is now clearly reinforced by placing “The Wonder Drug” placard on Bayer’s base Genuine Bayer Aspirin SKU. Bayer Aspirin Regimen also needed a more powerful branding message, and dialing up the heart icons gives the brand not only a stronger on-shelf image, but also one that amplifies the formula’s heart health message. The result was clarified formulation segmentation with an updated image that enhances a new brand position within an existing brand’s heritage. What we learned is that red heart icons, boldly touting “heart health,” are not just for cereal brands anymore.
Recognizing the shift in what the vegetarian consumer wants, IQ Design evolved the Yves brand out of an image of health food and into a hearty visual perception of “delicious meat that’s good for you.” The vegetarian consumer already knows that soy-based meatless products are the healthy alternative to real meat, however they were craving an appetizing visual promise of real meat presented against vivid colorscapes. The new design swapped the beret (the brand was originally founded by a French Canadian) for a chef’s hat, which reinforced appetite appeal within the brand’s logo. By challenging entrenched category “rules” and determining a new visual direction that boldly differentiates the Yves brand from its competition, we realized that the restage opportunity was to define and design to those unrecognized emotional needs that had always been present but were never visually articulated. What we learned is that health food does not have to look like health food to be perceived as healthy.
At IQ Design Group, we reinforce and build passion around those “small i” branding moves. Often, these design restages could be perceived as bolder if we looked at the opportunities through a more powerful lens. The “Let’s modernize the brand” mantra is a wonderful beginning to not only understanding how to refit our brands to today’s consumers, but also how to evolve entrenched category rules into new paradigms and growth opportunities for all.
Leslie Tucker is principal, chief creative officer, and cofounder of IQ Design Group (www.iqid.com), a New York City-based strategic brand design consultancy that helps clients build brand identities by creating and organizing visual cues that resonate with consumers’ emotions and aspirations. She can be reached at leslie@iqid.com.
