Package Design | packagedesignmag.com

By Linda Casey

With almost a thousand votes counted, Murray Brand Communications emerged victorious in Package Design’s annual Makeover Challenge for 2011. The company’s cheerful redesign of the Brazil Gourmet line of fruit juices earned praise from voters for its good use of negative space, fresh and refreshing color palette, and clever reimagining of the brand’s toucan iconography.

“I voted for the Murray Brand Communications’ submission because it really conveyed what the product was all about,” says Heinz packaging engineer Greg Roskos. “It was quick, it was efficient, and it made sense. The tropical look on the shrink wrap label conveys freshness and somewhere exotic, which is what you want to do for a tropical fruit juice company.”

A sense of the exotic was an important part of the brand strategy Murray Brand Communications built for Brazil Gourmet. The agency identified two strong competitors in the premium juice cooler section: Naked Juice and Odwalla. Although these brands have strong category presence and are known by consumers for their high-quality products, they don’t specialize in tropical fruit juices.

Designing differently
Brazil Gourmet wanted to create a unique brand position by leveraging its Brazilian heritage. Murray Brand Communications helped solidify the brand’s essence by identifying three words—fun, delicious, and healthy—to represent both the Brazilian culture and Brazil Gourmet’s products.

The concepts of fun, delicious, and healthy are all present in the new design, which uses whimsical illustration and type, beautiful photography of whole fruits, and a white background that tells an unconscious story of the juice’s purity, and bright tropical colors. The agency also improved on how Brazil Gourmet’s brand character—the toucan—is implemented in the package design.

On Brazil Gourmet’s current packaging (see page 20), the toucan is part of the logo lockup. This character and logo treatment helps Brazil Gourmet build brand equity, but the extent of its effectiveness is very dependent on its size. Murray Brand Communications noticed that the toucan tended to get lost on the small version of the logo lockup used for the brand’s Superfruits Tetra Pak carton.

The agency’s solution was to incorporate the toucan into the tropical flora background. This also helped the agency build the brand character into a story about the brand and product.