The Push Collective: Brand-flip
Tractor Design School - Industry Mentor Program
In my previous role at Tractor Design School I was given the opportunity to take part in a series of challenge briefs developed by some of Melbourne’s best design studios. Here is the first brief: The Brand-flip by the Push Collective.
The Brief
Push Collective have tasked us with selecting an existing brand and flipping it from its current target market. We are also allowed to create a new product to fit in with this brand flip. (So for example if I choose KFC and flipped it to a luxury product, it could now be a brand for selling street ware. The only restriction is it needs to be believable and suit the brand. You also need to aim to retain as much of the original brand as possible as well).
The Deliverables
The deliverables for this are:
1. Simple assessment of the existing brand identity
2. 1 x poster
3. 1 x home page of a smart phone
4. 1 x free choice
5. Describe what you decide to retain, remove, redesign and, (more importantly) why.
Restrictions / Challenges
Having a self-imposed 6 hours to work on this brief. So had to think super fast on my feet.
Chosen Brand to flip
Why McDonald’s? Mainly because I found this to be a very easy to recognise brand and I wanted to see if I could flip it into a market that was almost the opposite to who McDonald’s currently target.
The Flip
So how do you flip McDonald’s from a mass market brand into a luxury product? You turn it into a fresh, vegan green grocer based in Fitzroy. All of the produce is organic and purchased directly from farmers. Instead of selling a whole burger for $4.30 I would be selling an avocado for $5.85.
What to Retain?
Part of the brief was to identify what had to be retained from the existing brand with the aim to be as minimal as possible with the changes to the existing brand. So for this design I kept the following from the McDonald’s brand.
What to Evolve?
I decided I didn’t want to change too much with the McDonalds branding as I felt it was quite adaptable and also should transfer well to a different food based business.
Imagery to use
With imagery I wanted to use lots of images that feature great photography of different produce. This was inspired by McDonalds own marketing where they have a lot of advertisements where they have excellent food photography putting the product as the main hero (with the brand being a secondary item on the page). I felt this strategy would work well for this brand-flip.
Branding Application
Once I had sourced my imagery and had the brand elements set up I moved onto constructing a few possible poster designs for the new brand.
End Result
Overall I’m pretty happy with what I was able to achieve within the 6 hour time limit imposed by the brief. Also the feedback received from peers was all very constructive. One great piece of feedback I’d like to follow up on in future is refining the branding further by removing the golden arches and reducing the name of McDonald’s to McD’s. As I feel this could be interesting to try out.
Moving Forward
Moving forward there are a few things I’d like to revisit if time allows:
- Follow up on feedback on refining the branding (try without McDonalds arches and shorten name).
- Refine photography selection, as some imagery was a little too cold with its colour palette. (Pine Apple and Pumpkin image should be switched out).
- Develop website option further (develop a desktop version as well)
- Refine overall typesetting on posters and refine typeface selection for main copy.
