The Birds Eye frozen food brand in the United Kingdom has launched new packaging designs for its Simply Breaded and Harry Ramsden’s product ranges. Conceived and executed by the Brandon brand design consultancy, the new look heralds a move away from the master brand strategy Birds Eye has adopted over the past 10 years.
Tasked with reinvigorating the brand to help consumers find it more easily in supermarket freezers, Brandon has created a design that spotlights the product and evokes memories of happy times spent together as a family – round the dining table and at the seaside for the Simply Breaded range and Harry Ramsden’s, respectively.
As well as the nostalgic memories that are evoked through the food products, the new brand packaging introduces the emotive image of Captain Birdseye to the range. The sentiment it will have among people who fondly regard the iconic advertising mascot will help them more easily connect with his introduction to this line.
Birds Eye has been a family favorite within the UK for over 60 years, with its focus on providing nutritious, quality, freshly frozen foods. The ease and convenience of preparation of its variety of fish products is much appreciated by time-pressed consumers. However, in recent years, with the increased pressure from ever more sophisticated own label branding, Birds Eye marketers have had to push even harder than before to maintain and boost sales.
The existing color scheme of red for battered products and dark blue for breaded ones, combined with separate color coding for different fish species, have now been incorporated through the entire packaging design so that consumers can more easily identify the products they are looking for in supermarket and other retail freezers.
“Helping our consumers has always been at the core of how we approach everything,” said Steve Chantry, marketing director of the Birds Eye UK division of Nomad Foods. “Our products are designed to help mums serve up nutritious and delicious food every night of the week, and anything we can do to help the shopper identify the products they want with ease is a plus point. We feel our new Simply Breaded and Harry Ramsden packaging designs, with extended color coding across the graphics and photography, does this through simplifying their shopping experience.”
Chantry added: “Captain Birdseye is a firm family favorite, but we wanted to make sure that rather than just spotting the Captain, consumers could spot the particular product they are after. Brandon has been a fantastic partner from start to finish. They immediately understood our challenge and offered a solution that retains the nostalgia of our brand, which consumers know and love, while building each sub-brand’s individuality. We love the new designs and hope they will catch consumers’ eyes as much as they have ours.”
Richard Taylor, managing director at the Macclesfield, Cheshire-based Brandon consultancy, commented: “This brief from Birds Eye is the kind of challenge we really enjoy getting stuck into. It wasn’t just the fact that we were able to work with such an iconic brand, but that we were able to help consumers and drive a real change in the shopping experience. The simplification of the design was a really important factor in drawing the consumer back to this much beloved brand and making the overall buying experience, easier and more convenient.”
