How do you work with a big brand?

So, How Did The Relationship With Carmit Start?

Carmit’s marketing manager, Sharon Constantini, found us on Google and just called. She was nine months pregnant at the time, so we only got to see her once before she gave birth. This meeting was enough to give us the go ahead blessing for  a first project for Carmit (local market). In light of the success of the project we continued to work with Carmit Local Market, with Carmit Industry and with Carmit Exports.

How Do You Work With A Big Brand Like Carmit, For Example? How Is It Different From Working With A Small Brand?

Working with a large company such as Carmit (or, for example, other customers such as Nesher, Cinema City, etc.), is usually more complex than working with a small company.

The team attending the briefings and presentations is much larger, and everyone has their own point of view, their own vision, and way of going.

Each team member perceives and understands the brand or product based on their role in the company and the external entities with which they come in contact, and sometimes the opinions and understanding of the brand’s values ​​and vision are different within the same team. These are some of the reasons that make the craft of formulating and developing the briefing much more critical and complex.

With Carmit, as with any customer, it is important that the brand reflects and comply wuth its brief accurately. Also, for each client it is important to adapt the work to his personal taste, and here, actually, the extra cracking takes place, when there are a lot of decision makers.

Let’s Talk About Carmit’s Chocolate Brand, Carmit Cocoa, What Is It?

Carmit Cocoa & Co. is the name of Carmit products which are sold to the industry. We suggested the name “Carmit Cocoa & Co.”, until then it was called Carmit Professional.

How Did You Differentiate It From The Other Competitors In The Industry?

The problem with “Carmit Professional” brand was the mismatch between the high level of the products, the branding of Carmit (both within the local market and the industry) and the audience. Carmit Cocoa’s raw materials are of the best and finest, and they are available in almost every refrigerator in Israel: you can find them in the chocolate Magnum, or in the small white and brown chocolate rounds that come with the granola and more.

We decided to take this brand to the highest place with a logo and a name in English. We designed the logo as a quality label in order to convey the experience in full. Of course, the slogan in English is first-rate, short and sweet: “True Flavor”.

Where Did You Get Your Branding Inspiration From?

When we visited the Carmit factory, we were quite taken by the separation between milk chocolate and white chocolate in the large containers; it simply stood out to us. So we decided to play on the “half and half” world. The same buckets and crates are used for all the products so the experience could not have been all white chocolate and that the product would be then solely white  .

On the brown side we added a subtle texture of brown on brown, consisting of handmade illustrations of various pastries and desserts. All together creating a rich experience and highlighting the finished product that can be made from raw materials.

Another issue was differentiation. Due to the fact that all the products were packed in exactly the same crates or buckets, and it was still necessary to know what the packaging contained, our solution was colored stickers marked into 3 categories and which have an internal categorization of the names of the different products and ingredients that are displayed on each sticker in a large and visible manner.

The stickers arrive at the factory in rolls that are inserted into their printing machine, with an expiration date stamped on them, a catalog number and a barcode.

We found that they had a number of unbranded buckets left in the factory. The customers were not interested in receiving the goods in these unbranded buckets, even though they were the exact same goods, because they thought the product was not as good. Undoubtedly the sticker in this case further pushed the product forward  and gave it the premium experience that was so lacking.

What Other Projects Have You Done Or Will Do For Carmit Cocoa?

Following the great success of the packaging and the customer experience, Carmit Cocoa contacted us, asking us to design for them a website that contains a product catalog and that can be used in their continuous, ongoing work with the suppliers.

The new website has developed the new branding language, and contains the “half-and-half” play on pastries, and various sweet desserts. Here we also incorporated more textures, following the illustrated texture on the packaging.

In addition to working on the Cocoa & Co. brand, we have rebuilt Carmit’s official website, Carmit Candy’s website (export) and the packaging for the new products that Carmit is endeavoring to introduce to the market: no longer just sweets, but also high quality savory snacks, such as taralini and panini

Working with Carmit and any other major brand is not particularly easy, but it is worthwhile, for both parties. When the studio devotes itself to the hard work for the company and allocates its best efforts and resources (of course without neglecting the smaller brands), the result is evident. Customers embrace the changes, seeing that something good is happening,  that a new welcome change takes place.

Giant companies that have been operating in the market for years and have a catalog with dozens and hundreds of products, will eventually need to make a makeover and rebrand their products, adapt their visibility to the new world and to more selective customers. The world is changing, and so should the branding of the big companies.

ניסוח במקור – לבדיקה