Sarasa, a producer of olives and pickles based in Navarre, relied on packaging to renew its image, address the repositioning of its brand and organise its large product catalogue in order to launch its expansion plan. It was one of the success stories explained at Hispack to highlight the importance of packaging when it comes to developing a company’s business.
“If we were to say that brands had a soul, packaging design wouldn’t be just about changing clothes”. This is how Eva Minguella, the founder and creative director of Eva Estudi, began her speech at the Hispack session titled Packaging design, a partner in business development, designed to inspire SMEs and micro-enterprises. One of the most important allies when it comes to defining a brand’s positioning strategy, channels, range structure and product categories is packaging. We shouldn’t forget that packaging is one of the initial and one of the most important points of contact between the brand and the consumer for several reasons:
- It makes the business strategy more tangible and involves the portfolio organisation
- It conveys the brand’s positioning and values
- It communicates the product’s attributes and benefits
- It differentiates and enhances the value of the product with respect to its competitors. When packaging is restyled, the aim is to seek differentiation, give it a character of its own and leave a mark.
- It increases sales and business profitability
According to the creative director and founder of Eva Estudi, it’s essential to make a strategic reflection before starting a new packaging change or design: “Strategic planning provides a roadmap to determine the positioning and decision-making criteria and focuses us on market opportunities that capture value. Because a change of packaging means something new to tell”.
Before addressing the Sarasa case study, Minguella explained that most companies are divided into products, without placing consumers centre stage: “When we design the packaging, it’s a chance to work with the focus on the consumer”.
Sarasa, brand restyling based on strategic planning
Aceitunas Sarasa is an SME that was founded more than 50 years ago as a family-run company. It increased its list of products, but it didn’t plan its growth and it didn’t organise its new portfolio despite expanding with new ranges. In other words, it became a larger company but continued to operate as a family business.
The goal with the packaging re-design was clear: to add value and revitalise the olive and pickle category beyond a commodity, because customers often buy based on price. How can we ensure that a category that’s a commodity ceases to be a commodity? According to Minguella, by looking for distinctive values to leverage the brand’s growth. And they found that Sarasa knew how to do two things very well: make good seasonings and prepare excellent chilli peppers.
They continued with the distinctive values; if we’re able to make good dressings, we’re gourmets. The positioning therefore focused on “olive and pickle gastronomy”.
In Minguella’s words, “designers don’t invent anything, we transform”. In this regard, to create the new logo the team thought of a scarf, an element that unites the people of Navarre, and added the inverted triangle, a highly powerful visual geometric shape. They also took into account the design of the valances, inspired by Andalusian imaginary, due to the spices used for the dressings (the brand also has facilities in the south of the country). The aim of the entire design imagery was to build an image connected with traditional values.
According to the designer and teacher, the packaging attempts to be faithful to the product and convey the brand’s DNA and values. “When we re-design the packaging of a brand it’s dangerous to think just of a nice design; in this regard, we liked the idea of working on honesty with our own language and displaying a green olive that’s always presented in the same way”. Another element worth highlighting is the packaging made of glass, a material that embraces the idea of transparency, as well as the details related to craftsmanship and tradition.
According to Minguella, Sarasa is a highly monolithic brand: “Small brands should be monolithic, in other words, the ranges may be different but the brand unifies, we seek repetition”. In short, in the new branding and packaging definition we sought to organise a range of products focused on the consumer by applying a monolithic image as a nexus.
How does the need for a brand and packaging re-design arise within a company?
About two years ago, Antonio Sans joined Sarasa as sales and marketing director with the aim of developing the business, coinciding with a generational changeover. Sans explained that “there were more than 400 products without a design and without any criteria; it was a chaos of brands. What was clear to us was that we had to tidy things up and renew the brand on many levels”.
Beyond the natural reluctance brought about by a process of change in a family business, the restyling of the packaging was the first step in strategically analysing the references and, based on this analysis, some that were very similar were removed, as it made no sense for them to co-exist.
Asked which departments should take part in a packaging re-design, Sans replied that he was in favour of involving the whole organisation so that it felt like a cohesive part of the group, but the decision-making power should always rest with the departments with knowledge of the market.
Cristina Benavides, Hispack partner
