Salutem
Salutem is a brand owned by Centazzi, a company that entered the Portuguese market in 1924 originally with pectoral candies called Dr. Centazzi. However, it was in 1954 that the company took giant steps and registered Salutem as a brand of soy-based flours. The success achieved in the 60s allowed the launch of the first soybean processing factory in Portugal.
Salutem represents the foundations of healthy food in Portugal and was always characterized by its major ambition to create new products with the best quality. But along the way, new brands began to look at healthy offers to respond to consumer needs, increasing competition and making it more difficult to survive on product strategy alone. That’s when Salutem realized a complete brand strategy was essential.
Challenge
A transformative brand project aiming to renovate Salutem’s business positioning, create a refreshed look reflected in all brand expressions and maintain its relevance for years to come.
Outcome
Brand diagnosis and strategic recommendations for the new positioning; purpose definition and creation of an unique universe – verbal and visual wise – to be delivered through a final brandbook and final artwork of 41 SKUs.
Our role and goal
Define a new approach for the brand’s strategy that is able to extend possibilities within the brand reach.
→ Levering the brand trust and quality to design what will be more relevant for consumers tomorrow;
→ Finding a proprietary and unexplored brand territory.
Develop a verbal and visual universe that expresses the new brand.
→ Build a brand in tune with the history of the company that reflects the values perceived internally;
→ Elevate the brand to a flexible system that extends to all brand expressions.
Research
Results
In a market where brands are still very product-driven, instead of fighting for brand preference, we had to win the fight for brand equity and relevance. So we understood what was relevant for the consumer:
→ Consumers want a helpful and transparent brand. Greenwashing is a big no-no;
→ Usually there’s always a moment/reason in the consumers’ lives that makes them want to improve their eating habits;
→ There is a big pressure associated with having a healthy diet, most people prefer to think of a balanced way of eating;
Strategy & Brand Positioning
We needed to craft a positioning beyond the functional product’s attributes. We realized that Salutem, due to its major experience, has a very important role in educating consumers about the diet choices they should be making for a balanced lifestyle and has the responsibility to explain the technical attributes that should be analyzed in a product.
With a transparent approach, Salutem is positioned as the brand that delivers the best quality products for balanced eating habits, helps the indecisive and overwhelmed consumer make simple choices, and nourishes the consumer’s longevity by respecting their individual rhythms in each stage of their life.
Design Exploration
How can we express a post-demographic and innovative positioning that illustrates the brand’s future while maintaining codes that were part of Salutem’s legacy?
Logotype
Our logo is the key symbol to guarantee the trust and legacy of the brand. This logotype, highly adaptable to multiple brand scenarios, looks for inspiration in the foundation of the brand, specifically on the serif font and semi-circular top of the previous logos.
Instead of trying to show as a new brand in the market, with a friendly/bubbly type of logo, Salutem is proudly showing its age — Desde 1954 — as a way to promote trust. The line on top of the descriptor, only visible in the logo, is a brand asset called Legacy line.
Flexible brand system
Salutem’s brand system is inspired by the unique rhythm of each and everyone. The legacy line represents an invisible guideline for the positioning and transformation of the shapes that compose the brand system and acts as a visual metaphor for those individual rhythms since it can have multiple bends (the line can either be sharper or softer).
The shapes are hiper simplifications of Salutem’s visual context. Each product design takes advantage of the simplified shape of the main ingredient. The transformation along the line is also representative and/or inspired by the product itself, for example, every oat product uses a transformation between the simplified shape of an oat cob until the simplified shape of an oat flake.
