When you go to the pet food aisle for your furry friend, what persuades you to buy a product for a pet? In most cases, it’s the packaging that first catches our eye! Making packaging design a vital tool in furthering the identity of a brand. This would be a key requirement for WeAreFamily, who had a demographic they wanted to appeal to, and a story they wanted to tell:

So how did our branding agency utilise new packaging design for the international pet food brand?

WeAreFamily’s Identity 

Pet Food is often seen as a boring essential in pet ownership, the brand didn’t want this! WeAreFamily wanted to be a product that stood out in an international market and had a simplistic European-inspired packaging. They wanted to stand out as a brand that had packaging that’s good to look at for humans, and good to taste for pets!

The target demographic was important for WeAreFamily, and we tailored their packaging design with their brand identity and their target demographic in mind.

Target Audience

Internationally, young people have always loved France! The home of moody cinema, and great wine, what’s not to love? So when WeAreFamily created a French-inspired cat food brand, their target audience was already in mind. We had to create a packaging design that could be effectively marketed to young professionals, and young families.  

Through our research, we found that young professionals/ young families not only cared about what their pets ate but about what looked good in their kitchen. This was important in implementing what design we’d use to market their product. 

Competitors 

When looking at WeAreFamily’s competitors, we found rival brands were very lifestyle-based and predominately used dark colours. It was important for us to use a packaging design that stood out on the shelf, and didn’t blend into the array of black and gold pet food designs. 

After analysing the competition, WeAreFamily was the fur-midable opponent and we had to work on designing the packaging!

The Design 

The packaging design needed to display the French inspiration that first inspired WeAreFamily’s brand. This packaging also needed to stand out from its competitors and have instant visual appeal. This brand design developed into a packaging that uses French text to display what meat is going into every product.

Colours were also important to have instant visual appeal and unveil the European minimalism the brand had been inspired by. To display varieties within the pet food brand, the colours were in different colour pallets for the: 4-in-1, Adult, Senior, Kitten and Baby Cat ranges. Brighter colours were used for the 4-in-1 range,  Adult and Senior ranges predominately used beige with pops of colour, and the kitten ranges used light colours. These different colours and shades were inspired by what’s popular in French designs. 

All designs had the brand logo, and brand mechanism, BonBon spelling out the logo. Brand Mechanisms were also used for the “4-in-1” variety, where there was a “kapow” inspired explosion to visualise the pop of taste, and a heart was used for the kitten and baby cat range to differentiate between adult ranges. 

It was important for the font to be understandable to an international market, so we decided on a font that was strong and in block letters. This font was fun, as it was important for WeAreFamily to not come across as serious; so we didn’t scare away WeAreFamily’s target audience with intense text!

Not the end!

Whilst going through the packaging design process, the final product was a packaging design that stood out on the aisle from other cat food brands as a European-themed alternative. 

The marketing journey with WeAreFamily is by no means over! The last blog was on their branding, we still have to discuss the website and video and the overall effectiveness of the campaign!

Excited to know more? We’ll keep up the meo-mentum with a blog about the website next!