There’s a tried and tested formula to create an award winning brand that can cement itself as a serious industry stayer straight out of the gates. Here, we take a dive into the areas of focus to achieve this success through the lens of recent branding project, Giddy Citizen.
According to a Harvard Business Review, about 75% of packaged goods fail to earn their projected value in the first year. This is because most families only buy from the same 150 brand names they know and trust, leaving little room for new brands to break into consumers' hearts and wallets.
A major contributing factor for capturing and engaging a consumer, is branding — something that often takes second seat to product development. To create a strong product from the outset, with enough shelf-appeal to generate consumer interest, these two entities need to be harmoniously working in unison. A brilliant product, with branding to reflect and amplify the quality, values and traits that the product, and greater brand, subscribes to.
How do you ensure your brand is ticking the boxes across meaning, magnetism and momentum to prevail in a saturated market?
How will your brand stand out from the competition, declaring it’s here to stay, while communicating all the heart and hope that was present the day the idea was born?
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Be remarkably different.
Not a groundbreaking concept but surprisingly unicorn to achieve. Look at the competitive landscape and be brave enough to step outside the norm. Put the saturated market excuse to bed and evaluate what you could be doing to make your brand shine. What unique value does your product add to the market? Which specific consumer does your brand appeal to? Hone your niche and perfect your tone of voice.
Giddy Citizen approached Smack Bang with a high-quality fermented food and beverage product and a unique vision to match. The challenge presented to ensure Giddy Citizen was not just another probiotic beverage brand new to market. We had to focus on differentiation with a goal to amplify the Giddy Citizen USP and connect with their target audience. The result was the development of an identity that aesthetically aligned with the brand and was infused with personality and light-hearted fun at every touchpoint.
The Smack Bang strategy:
‘The concept development for Giddy Citizen’s visual identity centres around the idea of Good Vibrations. Inspired by the word, ‘giddy’, the branding seeks to capture that feeling of giddiness — ecstatic, free-flowing movements, sparking joy through body and mind. This concept envisions a brand mascot to represent this giddy feeling that you experience when you eat/drink a Giddy Citizen product.
We imagine the Giddy Citizen to be one specific gender neutral character, who assumes new shapes and moments of eccentricity and energy — a character that holds relevance with the product range, can grow with the brand and can be easily modified to seamlessly align with each individual product variant.’
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Connect with your consumer emotionally.
People make purchases based on how brands make them feel. Switch your approach from selling a product or service to connecting with a feeling or emotion and watch people’s response to your brand change. To successfully elicit an emotional response from your audience you need to know exactly who your audience is, and in turn, who you are speaking to. Engage in market research and take time to know and understand your target demographic. Once you have a clear picture of your people, consider a focus group with your ideal customers and gain their individual feedback to your product, your packaging and your branding, prior to launching your final ideation.
Get inside the consumer's mind and pivot your strategy to reflect, and essentially re-market, these ideals back to them.
Giddy Citizen evokes feelings of fun and frivolity. With an aim to inject emotion into the product line we set out to convey the correlation of healthy, gut loving products with having fun at the same time. We knew that by encouraging those sentiments in Giddy Citizen’s consumers, they are going to want to come back time and time again and engage with the brand. The most successful brands are both emotive and compelling in order to stand out from the mass of options in the marketplace.
A note from the Giddy Citizen founder:
‘Smack Bang really humanised the Giddy Citizen brand. They brought it to life so it wasn’t simply another new, predictable brand and product on the shelf. You want Giddy Citizen to be part of your everyday and you’re encouraged and motivated to engage with the brand because of the way it makes you feel.’
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Build the packaging into the experience.
There’s power in packaging; everything a brand does is part of the image they present to potential customers. Many brands will work overtime to cultivate an image of their brand but stop short of the finish line when it comes to packaging. There should be deep consideration of how a brand is presenting products to consumers, and whether or not that experience matches the overall branding.
There’s a reason it’s so pleasing to unbox a new Apple product. Its packaging is such a clear representation of the sleek, user-friendly experience of the product itself.
Packaging is a powerful tool, it creates the perfect anchor for consumers to base their purchasing decision on when facing the onslaught of similar products staring back at them on the supermarket shelf. In many cases, packaging can be the deciding factor.
A note from the Giddy Citizen founder:
‘I wanted to portray my products to the market in a way that would make them pop on retail shelves and jump out of refrigerators yelling ‘hey! I’m different from the others, I’m better, you need me now’, in a light, happy and memorable way.’
Packaging for Giddy Citizen, a project highlight, was a collaboration with illustrator Aley Wild. Teaming with a like-minded brand or creative allows you to cross promote in a clever way and in some cases, leverage a new audience. We created a hero character that has since become a unique, eye-catching mascot for the brand conveying happiness with an infectious spirit to boot. These charismatic characters have become the best part of the packaging — eye-catching and intriguing, ready to dive right into your cart.
Create with the intention of infusing your brand into all facets of your packaging.
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Get to the point with your unique value proposition.
Make your brand purpose blaringly clear. Without a definitive why, the appropriate how will never reveal itself.
When brands don’t have a clear value proposition and meaning behind what they do, it becomes almost impossible to find your audience. For Giddy Citizen, this value proposition was innately obvious from the outset, a warrior wellness brand with heart, set to prove that health and happiness are intertwined — leaving a positive impact on both the people and planet.
Communicate with your audience who you are and what you stand for and the right customers will come and stay.
The Smack Bang strategy:
‘Giddy Citizen tells a very cohesive story which gives it clear intention and relevance with its consumer. The brand narrative flexes with strength and confidence across all brand touchpoints. Our direction prioritised the taste element before the health benefits (radically delicious, surprisingly healthy). By flipping the usual approach, we were able to create a brand that was lifestyle first — enabling a greater target market to connect with the product upon first interaction.’
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Continue fostering connections.
We know human connections are at the heart of every successful brand and having a strong, open line of communication with your consumer base is critical to building trust in your brand but also in gauging feedback and navigating improvements. It’s important to lead with the notion that you’re dealing with people, not just numbers on a screen. Align a persona to your audience/s where you can, it serves as a great reminder to keep things real and relevant. Use your platforms to share your brand narrative and create relatability with your consumer — public interest, and revenue, will come as a natural byproduct of people feeling engaged and connected to a brand.
Humans do business with humans.
The Smack Bang strategy:
‘We wanted the Giddy Citizen consumer to experience a sense of joy from their interaction with the products. We had to drill into the core of the brand’s heart to identify exactly what it stood for and how that would translate, and appeal, to the modern day consumer.
The founder’s vision for expansion meant we needed to create a brand that was both credible and confident but also had market longevity. We tapped into the human element through the post-consumption product qualities — tangible feelings that could be emulated throughout the entire brand narrative and greater identity.’
Smack Bang’s work across Giddy Citizen recently won Bronze at the Global Indigo Awards.
