Creating a positive impact throughout the food cycle
Branding
With Sovena
Challenge
Define a new brand positioning aligned with Sovena’s renewed purpose — Feeding Futures to enable Oliveira da Serra to tackle future challenges while maintaining its leadership and relevance for years to come.
Outcome
Brand diagnostic and strategic recommendations for the new positioning. Purpose definition and creation of a unique universe — verbal and visual, conveyed through a brand book.
our role
01
To create a strategy and positioning recommendations based on the new day-to-day context and paradigm that can extend possibilities within the brand reach.
02
To develop a verbal and visual universe that expresses the new brand.
goals
- Leveraging what the brand has built as the stepping stone to design what will be more relevant for consumers tomorrow.
- Finding brand ownership and unexplored brand territory.
- Build a brand in tune with Sovena's DNA and purpose.
- Elevate the brand to an exceptional standard of its own.
RESEARCH
We assembled a multidisciplinary team to dive into the context of olive oil usage in order to observe, feel, experience, and fully understand how it’s linked to our history, culture, and daily lives.
Trying to understand purchase, usage, and discarding habits.
We gathered information regarding consumers’ habits, brand perception, purchase preferences, sustainability, and health motivations throughout an online survey. More than 1000 people have participated.
We talked directly with those who live for and from food.
We had meals at different restaurants to taste different flavors and take in the knowledge of some of the best chefs in Lisbon, and observe people’s habits.
We looked at our own kitchen.
Day after day, we took notes about our consumption habits to have a more accurate vision of the presence of olive oil in our meals.
We brought new experiences to ourselves.
We took food challenges to spice up and test our culinary skills. We boosted our contact with these products while training our taste buds. We disclosed more about flavor, usage, and composition and brought first-hand insights.
We uncovered motivations, habits, perceptions, and behaviors.
We headed to the field, taking a quality over quantity approach. We were committed to explore these topics taking context, market, and consumer profiles into our research.
Inspired by a classic exercise, we challenged people to draw the logo from the top of their minds and see what was most memorable to them. Although most participants struggled to remember all the elements, we noted clear connections associated with the brand.
We accompanied people in stores and their households.
Following shoppers through their consumer journey at supermarkets helped us understand their overall decision-making process. While shadowing meal cooking, we were able to see how consumers live and feel while using the products.
Exploring the users’ journey with olive oil.
We used the Experience Fellow as a tool to allow users to report their daily interaction with the product, creating and sharing touchpoints with the research and development team. We accessed descriptions, feelings, strengths, and weaknesses linked to the purchase moment, product use, and disposal and came across unexpected data.
Creatively exploring the products to spur disruptive insights.
Feed Lab ran for seven months and was designed to be a place of experimentation aimed at creatives from different areas. The goal was to enable experiences exchange and outline new ideas for products or solutions for key moments such as purchase, manufacture, and disposal of the products under study. We set the challenge to explore the products creatively to bring disruptive insights to life through prototyping.
Validating our findings to establish guidelines.
We gathered multidisciplinary teams, bringing together people from Oliveira da Serra, Sovena, and With Company to creatively explore future paths. We set several brand challenges for them to tackle without any constraint but time.
What have we found?
Thinking outside (and around) the olive grove, it’s already on Oliveira da Serra’s agenda, mainly with relatively unknown innovation projects. Still, there’s a powerful intention that something has to change internally and that the brand can generate a social transformation. We are all left with the consciousness that there is a project bigger than the brand itself.
30
In-depth interviews
10
Feedlab activities
1000+
Survey answers
20
Logos drawn by memory
4
Mobile ethnographies journeys
10+
Shops visited
5
Service safaris
STRATEGY & brand positioning
We identified the struggles of consumers related to this market. From there, we needed to craft a positioning beyond the functional product’s attributes. We immersed ourselves in the research to uncover new insights. We connected what is identifiable as Oliveira da Serra with what would be relevant for people in the future, delivering a positive and “out of the bottle” output, and creating a positive impact throughout the entire food cycle.
DESIGN EXPLORATION
How to express this differentiating positioning that illustrates the brand’s future while maintaining codes that were part of Oliveira da Serra’s legacy?
The commitment to create a positive impact must revolve around actions, behaviors, and products. Nevertheless, the first step towards it was the brand design. In line with branding trends, our approach was to simplify, remove the noise, and bring the brand to its core.
The logo is the most identifiable symbol of this ideal. The refined weight and crafted negative space made the new logo even more recognizable in various sizes and contexts.
We also knew that seemingly decisions could significantly impact when multiplied by thousands of products and touchpoints. Therefore, the sustainable essence of the brand is reflected both in the construction and solutions to materialize it:
- Our logo uses only one color;
- Our color palette was made of sustainable colors, consciously chosen because they reduce the amount of ink required on prints;
- Through a halftone pattern effect, we reduce the area and amount of ink applied to compositions;
- Our stamps seek to highlight commitments with relevant impact.
BRAND TESTING
After the rebrand, it was essential to determine the impact and projection the new brand would have. Considering that consumers are what matters the most, we focused on the strengths that the new brand would deliver them. We asked what should be iterated and considered in order to influence the strategic brand paths we crafted.
It was crucial to understand how the new identity and brand expressions could enable Oliveira da Serra to move towards the strategy we designed and how consumers and stakeholders perceived it.
Results
With the new purpose of creating a positive impact throughout the food cycle, Oliveira da Serra carries the flag of its commitment to the Earth — from a micro-scale to the planetary one. It will engage and empower consumers through good products that make a difference.
Our design guidelines were just the starting point of a holistic, sustainable approach. Those guidelines empower our client to continue exploring and expanding the brand’s use beyond our participation. From the design of new products, packaging, materials used, and communication actions — everything is linked today, and the guidelines anchored on the brand’s truth allow it to continue so in the future — aiming for a more positive impact in every decision, and inspiration to lead others to change.
Our outputs reflect the brand’s outcomes. Aligned with Oliveira da Serra’s goals: a modernized brand, prepared for the future through a progressive value expansion, focused on its strengths and main assets as a ladder to take the following steps.
