Heinz

Print Communications, Illustration

We have completed numerous projects for Heinz, commissioned by FM Marketing, over the years.  Projects have included: instruction manuals and packaging design for sauces Heinz launched in collaboration with Wetherspoons; trade magazine designs; and advertisements for Heinz's Amoy range, including sauces and soups.

The brief:
Soup is traditionally associated with autumn and winter but Heinz also wanted to increase sales in spring and summer through its various trade associates. FM Marketing were approached to create such a campaign, with JDJ Creative supplying the visuals to support the concepts, including advertisements, menus, promotional designs and email newsletter templates. 

Points of interest

• Of course, we had to respect a fully-established and proven brand such as Heinz whilst introducing fresh visuals designed to motivate and enthuse businesses to promote soup as perennial food.
• We had to communicate the commercial incentive for trade outlets to promote soup to its customers.

The process

1. Soup immediately conjures images of winter afternoons and comfort food.  Whilst welcome, this also potentially restricts sales. We set out to design promotional material that reminded trade outlets that (i) soup, with its broad varieties, was attractive an attractive food option all year round, and (ii) there was a meaningful commercial incentive to promote it in their stores.
2. Heinz soup is associated with the colour red, clearly a warm colour. This posed a challenge - promoting a warm product (in every sense) to a spring/summer market.  Since we needed to be faithful to the Heinz brand, we had to retain the colour scheme and rely instead on typography and visuals.
3. We chose a typeface that was animated, simple and clean to suggest a product that was alive and awake (for spring and summer) as well as familiar and comforting (for autumn and winter).  The typeface was arranged to suggest the vitality, warmth and comfort that emanates from soup.
4. We also used the visual as an opportunity to inject life into the product, bestowing mini personalities to the soup. This was an economical way to remind the audience that soup was a perennial, living thing.
5. Finally, we used a more familiar, casual tone in the copy to communicate a more personable, human interaction with the trade outlets rather than a cold, commercial promotion.

The result
The result was a design that respected the Heinz brand whilst working within, at times, opposing constraints, e.g. promoting soup to a summer market; retaining warm colours in the design etc. This project was an enjoyable challenge that highlights the thought and intelligence that goes into graphic design and which great studios pride themselves on.

Commissioned by: FM Marketing