Two Stages of Brand Creation: Case Study of CLEANING COLOR COSMETICS

Brand creation is extremely challenging for any company, especially when you don’t know where to start, what to do, and what to consider.

This article will introduce you to the process of brand creation for our customer CLEANING COLOR COSMETICS. You will learn:

• How a newly born brand can “talk” to the buyer right from the shelf;
• How big household chemical brands ignore the male audience; and
• How to launch a new product in a highly competitive environment.

Where We Started

We break down the process of brand creation into two stages, namely the strategic and the creative ones. It is important to understand that the structure of each stage is unique and depends on various factors, ranging from the vision of a particular specialist to the tasks set by the customer.

Strategic Stage

This stage begins with the development of the brand strategy and setting goals and objectives. It includes several mandatory sub-stages, which does not, however, mean that the work shall be carried out in strict accordance with the template. A strategist is first and foremost a thinker, whose decisions determine the steps to be taken next. The strategist acts based on:

• Professional experience and developments;
• Project goals and objectives;
• Input data provided by the customer.

Having accomplished each sub-stage, we make micro-conclusions, which lay the basis for further decisions. Brand strategy is a creative product.

The CLEANING COLOR COSMETICS customer came to us with trust and was open to any ideas, which is very cool. When a customer trusts the vision of the agency, they give us space to come up with creative and, most importantly, feasible ideas. Our work with CLEANING COLOR was structured as follows:

Brief Completion by Customer

Each project is unique. Still, all of them have one thing in common: any good project begins with a brief, filled out by the customer meticulously. It is the customer who gives us a deeper insight into the product or service so that we can ultimately complete the tasks.

Situation Analysis and Market Research

Cleaning Color is a newly born brand, and therefore we had to conduct a competitor analysis in the established household chemicals market.

We considered two types of competitors: popular mass-market household chemicals and environmentally friendly products marketed in dedicated stores.

It was obvious that the market would be oversaturated with super-effective products with aggressive formulas, against the background of which eco-friendly products would seem to be ineffective and also expensive. It is not entirely clear how to launch another eco-friendly product in such a situation, is it?

The situation does look deadlock, but only in theory. In practice, we delved into the analysis of the eco competitors’ positioning and found an elegant solution.

Positioning Development

A little theory in simple terms: positioning is the emotional and functional benefits of the product that shall encourage a purchase. It’s not just the price and appearance. What benefit will I get by purchasing this product? What properties does it have? What problems can it solve? The answers to these questions are, in fact, positioning.

While working on Cleaning Color, we examined the logic of eco competitors’ positioning, stating that “natural formula = safety to nature.” We believe that such final positioning misleads the consumers, making them forget that eco-friendly products shall, first of all, mean safety FOR YOU, your family, and your children, and not just for the environment. At the same time, the effectiveness of such products was not mentioned by eco competitors in their positioning, which made those products a less advantageous purchase against the background of aggressive mass-market household chemicals. What did we do?

To highlight the clear competitive advantage of the Cleaning Color products, we decided to make an inversion and position them by the following principle: “the product is safe FOR ME because it has a pure formula, and it is effective at the same time!” The eco-friendly nature of the product in this case was highlighted in the positioning and pushed the competitors into the background! But we didn’t stop there.

To do this, you have to find a way to:

• Switch the consumer to eco-friendly products;
• Win back those consumers who were not happy with the effectiveness of eco-friendly household chemicals for some reason.

This is quite a challenge because the consumer in the mass market usually pays much attention to price and is unlikely to overpay. What did we do?

We added more value to the product so that the purchase of the Cleaning Color products would look more profitable despite the price. To that end, we needed to work out the brand message.

Target Audience Expansion and Brand Message Development

It is usually adult women who are experienced in the matters of domestic life, raising children, and keeping order in the house. Having analyzed the situation, we made an interesting conclusion: household chemicals only communicate with women. Don’t men ever clean the house? They most definitely do!

The world is changing; gender roles are diluting. Men are increasingly involved in everyday matters, but brands still communicate as they did in the past. We decided to expand our target audience in a modern way and to shift away from women to people aged 25-35 years old, whose love language is cleaning. These people are interested in trends and pay attention to the current news agenda, including the environmental one. They support their partners in domestic matters and share household duties.

One more important point to add: like most of us, they do not like the cleaning process as such. They often have to force themselves, to postpone the cleaning to the next day or weekend. But they most definitely like the feeling after it’s done: they are pleased with the result and proud of themselves.

That’s how we came up with the correct brand message: Cleaning Color – the household chemicals that make you better:

• When you buy them, it means that you care about the environment;
• When you use them because it means that you are not lazy and made yourself clean the house!

Summing up the creative stage, we can say that Cleaning Color is a motivator for those who want to be better. It is safe, biodegradable, yet effective for those who take pride in the results.

And thus, brand positioning was done.

Creative Stage

The strategic stage was over, and the project was given into the custody of the creative department team, i.e. the creative specialist, designers, and copywriters.

Packaging Design

When working on the packaging design, one shall consider that everything related to the product will communicate with the audience: the color and the smell of the product, the packaging and the label, the colors and the fonts used on the container, and even the composition of the plastic from which the container is made. Everything communicates and creates a seamless image of the product in the eyes of the consumer.

Therefore, we decided to use a convenient, transparent, and clean container with a dispenser for the Cleaning Color products to emphasize the purity and transparency of the composition of eco-friendly products.

Tone of Voice

The tone of voice is the tone in which a brand communicates with its consumer. In this project, we made a decision that was rather unusual for the household chemicals market – we chose a playful and simple tone of voice. The brand communicates with the consumer on an equal footing, in a positive way, understandable for its target audience.

Slogan Development

At the strategic stage, our team chose to focus on the end user rather than the product. Bearing that in mind, we developed the following slogan: “It’s purely your merit!”

Thus, we reflected on the positioning of the product: it was YOU who got rid of the stain, it was YOU who made everything clean, and it was not chemicals but YOU who started cleaning. We did not praise the product, as competitors often do – we praised the consumer, making our product stand out on the shelf.

Label and 3 Creative Design Tricks

Note: When developing the packaging and labels, one shall not exclusively rely on the designer’s imagination or vision of how the product should look like. To fulfill the tasks that the customer sets for us, we use the unique method of evidence-based design. This technique warrants that the use of each design element is justified and serves a specific function. Simply put, we can explain why a certain font, color combination, etc. was used.

During the development of a label for the Cleaning Color products, we used both the visual component of communication, as competitors do, and the following creative techniques.

Copyrights

We asked ourselves, what could make the product stand out, and found an amazing way to become more noticeable – copyrights. Such funny messages make the product look like it communicates with the audience, motivating it to clean up, praise, encourage and cheer up. Copyrights emphasize the product positioning and remind the consumer that THEY are the ones who did a great job.

• Measure seven herbs, and wash once.
• Clean dishes for a nice home.

In addition, copyrights are integrated into the names of fragrances to set a positive tone in this form of communication as well.

• Cotton-scented soap is a godsend for delicate hands.
• Coconut-scented soap is love without a question.

Stickers and Infographics

Another interesting technique we used is stickers and infographics. They help to communicate useful and important information about the product positively while making it easier to understand.

Unique QR Codes

We placed a unique QR code on each label with a link to a dedicated chatbot. It reminds the user of the need to clean up playfully. It also has other useful features:

• A randomizer for choosing a household member who will wash the dishes, clean the house or perform other household chores;
• Messages that motivate to clean in a playful form;
• A product catalog;
• Store addresses.

Way Forward

The product is now ready to go on the shelf. It performs all the tasks set and speaks for itself by positioning. We will continue to promote the product. How? We will delve into this in the next article for the Dairy Blog.

In conclusion, we would like to say that the creation of a new brand is always a team effort of the agency staff and the customer. Whenever the customer is actively involved at all the stages and trusts the vision of the agency at the same time, cool projects are born that accomplish the tasks assigned to them completely. We are happy to show them in our portfolio.