- Farmers realised they could benefit by using design to make their product more saleable
- They commissioned consumer researchers to find out what buyers knew about the market for speciality cooking oils
- The local provenance of the food was incorporated into the design of the name, bottle and promotional material
- Designers adapted off the shelf bottles with bespoke labels to keep costs down
- They prototyped new names and label designs to test them on their target audience
The growers and makers of a British cooking oil product knew they needed a name, a pack and a marketing strategy that would stick in people minds. But they were wary about investing in a new brand identity. They knew that if you get the name right, you create all-important ‘stickiness’ with your target audience - a term that author Malcolm Gladwell waxed lyrical about in his influential book ‘The Tipping Point’. Get it wrong, however, and your product - no matter how great or well designed it is - could fall flat on its face.
This was the conundrum facing Borderfields, a group of Northumberland farmers who wanted to create a product that added value to the grain and rapeseed that they grew.
The plight of the nation’s farmers has been well documented in recent years, thanks to outbreaks of diseases such as foot and mouth and bluetongue, and this was one of the reasons that Borderfields wanted to move on from the traditional farming model and diversify into other markets. To this end the firm commissioned consumer research experts Dunnhumby to investigate the market for speciality cooking oils. The resulting report, which called on data accumulated by Tesco’s Club Card scheme, showed that an opportunity existed for a ‘high value oil with health appeal and regional provenance’.
While production of the oil would be relatively straightforward - intensive production processes are a familiar concept to Borderfields’ farmers - where the group lacked experience was taking a niche product of this nature to market.
So it called on the services of Newcastle-based design agency NE6 Design and briefed it to come up with a bottle shape and label that would exude an air of quality and luxury to retail buyers and the oil’s primary target audience of 35 to 50-year-old women.
‘When they first approached us we thought that the product was a cracking idea,’ explains NE6 director David Coates. ‘It had a number of nice aspects to it: it was a locally produced product that was very traceable and it had a small carbon footprint.’
Although the design budget of £15,000 was fairly modest, Coates realised early on that the project would be tough to manage, not because of any financial limitations, but because it depended on getting the farmers to look at the way that the product was designed and marketed as if they were the target consumer and not the producers. ‘The whole point is that this product was not aimed at the farmers - it was aimed at design literate people who were used to making choices and would respond to a strong design and brand name,’ says Coates.
While he concedes that Borderfields was ‘very open minded’ and encouraging throughout the design stage, it became clear to Coates, based on these early discussions, that the major sticking point would be what the product would be christened.
‘The biggest challenge is always the name because it only really becomes reality when it is marketed and publicised so it’s always difficult to get people to agree on something,’ says Coates. ‘The oil was going to go into special stores - delicatessens and places like Harvey Nichols where it would be competing with macadamia or walnut oils - so we didn’t want the name to sound too twee or rusticated and we tried to avoid anything that had connotations of jumpers and slippers.’
