Legen-dairy brands.
Client: Personal
Disciplines: Concepts, Rendering, Industrial Design, Market Research, Business Research, Branding, Digtial Sculpting
Year: 2020
This short-project was an exercise in product identity. I've always been of the belief that when it comes to products, the graphical elements making up brand-identity is a critical but secondary concept to product identity for creating a recognisable brand. When I think of household names: BIC, Dyson, Apple, Nintendo, even Duck Bleach, they all have their absolute distinguishing features from their product, not whatever it's packaged in. Remove their logos, colours and other graphical branding, and we can all still recognise a household product through silhouette alone.
I wanted to try taking a couple of household brands from Mondelez Ltd., namely Cadbury & Toblerone, and create new product ranges that were simultaneously new, and recognisable to their respective brands.
Cadbury was my first brand, and researching into their past products showed a strong ability to base their ranges around different inventive themes, their Marvellous Creation & Heroes ranges being obvious examples.
With Cadbury, I wanted my theme to tap into a very raw feeling of discovery, something the inventiveness of Cadbury products feel apt for.
The first design was designed to be closer to a medley of previous Cadbury ventures, incorperating elements of both Crunchie & Marvellous Popping Candy.
This allowed me to flesh out the new theme without drifting too far from traditional products.
Mango & Lime was designed as a total wildcard. The flavours, whilst not unique in the confectionary world (lime & chocolate have been used almost as long as the industry itself), within Cadbury's brand it was unique, but also fit the more exotic, valuable style my range was looking to achieve.
Mint in Cadbury products tends to be rather rare, given the more niche demographic who enjoy the flavour this is understandable, but I felt within the context of a brand new product, that there was room to introduce this flavour.
From a manafacture perspective, the main element would likely have to formed in two sections: a concave button, with the mint "geode crystals" scattered on top.
I wanted a familiar brand to make an appearance, in order to entice those familiar with previous products that might be wary of new ventures. Daim has been crossed with Cadbury before in bar-form, so these small-form confectionaries are not too big of a leap in terms of brand-alteration.
Normally iteration would be done through sketching, but I've found great use recently trying to use digital sculpting to iterate designs, literally moulding models like clay to try different ideas quickly, much like how the automotive industry uses real-life clay sculpting for bodywork.
in a league of their (tobler-)own
Whilst Cadbury had the luxury of having much of it's brand based on invention whilst holding tradition, Toblerone was very-much held to far stricter set of traditional rules.
Beyond some small offshoot products, the brand has changed very little in years, and customers have come to have passionate expectations over any changes, so I had to be very careful with any new ventures.
Much like Cadbury, I felt any changes might fair better if they aimed to communcate a theme.
In this case, I wanted to try and communcate Toblerone as a social-event product, something layed out at events and parties; since I felt it was something that no other Mondelez products suitably filled, and that Toblerone could fill the role perfectly whilst still keeping its classic style.
Alongside the ornamental style of the Crests, I wanted to give a sense of creativity, the tesselation of the pyramid-shape allowing people to fit the chocolate to the theme of the event.
The whole pyramid couldn't be solid chocolate, so to prevent people breaking their teeth I chose something closer to a praline as a filling. This is as distant as I felt the concept could get from the original products without becoming unrecognisable.