Canei
1. Understanding the brand: Wine made accessible
Canei is a wine brand for people who don’t like wine. Or at least they don’t like standard dry whites and reds. Made in the Canelli region of Italy from Moscato grapes, Canei is slightly sweet, low in alcohol and semi-sparkling.
The brand is over 30 years old and available in 18 international markets, but it is especially strong in The Netherlands. It was acquired in 2007 by the Baarsma Wine Group, which consolidated its position in the Dutch market and embarked on an expansion strategy, aiming to develop new markets and extend the portfolio.
2. Understanding the consumer: Life sparkles!
Canei’s biggest (Dutch) fans are 35-45 years old, down-to-earth women who may well have grown up with the brand, finding it a highly accessible first alcoholic drink that they continue to enjoy. Drunk at regular, informal social occasions with girlfriends, Canei is perceived as fun, easy-drinking and ever so slightly indulgent.
Other markets such as the UK, USA and China identified clusters of consumers with similar attitudes and requirements. This allowed a new global brand positioning to be created based on a positive attitude: Life Sparkles!
3. Defining the task: Get noticed
These high potential consumers thought that Canei’s bottle was distinctive and fresh, but that its label design was dated and recessive. The success of a fruity sub-range made it important to start imagining new innovations for Canei, to stimulate product development and excite distributors. And without a significant above the line budget, a bold and well-managed design system was also required, to maximise the impact of brand communications.
4. Creating: Vibrant and chic, and not just the label.
There are plenty of delightful wine labels out there, but the true design challenge is to make the packaging design the final link in a chain of desire.
The label redesign introduced black as a unifying brand colour across the five-strong range, punctuated with a brightly-coloured ‘C’ that contains the branding and product information as well as coding for wine type. The descriptor was changed to ‘Vino Frizzante’ (Vino d’Italia in USA) to highlight the wine’s authentic Italian provenance.
Off-pack the colour codes were defined as black, pink and green (reflecting the label colours of the core range), and brand symbols, typography, layouts and photographic style were defined in a comprehensive guideline document.
In the end all the real marketing will be local, but we had the chance to follow our own guideline by designing the roadshow materials: posters, banners, brochures and promotional items, as well as both online and hard copy versions of the guideline itself.
5. Believing: New beginnings
There has been a very positive response from distributors across the world, who feel that they now have a complete marketing toolkit to help promote Canei and grow distribution and sales. The guideline has been used to develop and launch the new global website canei.com, the centrepiece of a major social media initiative for the relaunch in summer 2011. New markets have been opened up, and we are now refining the thinking to exploit growth opportunities for Canei in its core markets.
Manon de Gunst, Marketing Manager: ‘We had a very challenging scope and timing, to completely re-invent the Canei brand look and feel in time for our planned roadshows.’ Osborne Pike delivered superbly at all levels: creativity, project management and consultancy, and they also created some stunning NPD concepts to inspire our markets and product development team.’
You rock, Manon!
