Safio
1. Understanding the brand: Milk power
Alsafi-Danone leads the milk category in the Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia. It has achieved this by innovating its Alsafi brand of fresh dairy products, but also by building a strong position in milk for Kids through the Safio brand.
Safio is the name of a cartoon superhero who represents the brand in its advertising and also appears on packaging, POS and online. His role is to demonstrate the benefits of milk to kids and their parents, which he does in advertising by ‘powering up’ on Safio milk drinks, before seeing off assorted playground enemies, such as a giant sand octopus. Scary!
2. Understanding the consumer: Growing up strong
Safio uses a classic Kids brand strategy of appealing to Mums through Kids, which as a genuinely healthy product it has the license to do. Less healthy characters are treated with far more skepticism by adults.
Kids are engaged by characters which have plenty of, well, character, and a bit of a back story: What is their personality? Where do they live? Who are their friends? What do they do?
The story that kids and mums love in equal measure is simple: Safio the hero: strong, brave and just; maybe you could be like him too.
3. Defining the task: Game on
The key to success is to ensure that Safio remains the coolest brand ambassador in a competitive market with no shortage of wannabes.
The existing packaging featured the character in a variety of poses and with some nice ‘kit’ such as a jetski, but all of this detail came at the expense of impact.
4. Creating: Hit me!
As with nearly all kids’ brands, advertising was moving into CGI in order to stay up to date with developments in movie character design. This was also our initial approach to Safio on pack, but we quickly learned that there are some unwritten rules:
a) human characters are much harder to perfect than fruits
b) packaging isn’t a movie and those 3d shadows can look dirty
c) true character only arrives when you get to ‘95% Pixar’
We also had an alternative approach based on ‘Manga’ style cartoons, which are popular in Saudi Arabia and also fitted well with typical Safio storylines. We created a range of strong and simple action poses, dealing with the fact that our main selling face belongs to a 200ml flexo-printed carton.
5. Believing: Going strong
Research of the all-action 2D character and his cool new body armour was very positive amongst both kids and mums. In store the brand has a lot more power, and sales have responded with a positive increase since the launch of the new pack.
AbdulMouhsen al-Madani, Marketing Manager: “As soon as we saw the work from OP we felt they had really got inside our consumers’ minds. Safio’s new look is fresh, bold, clean and strong, fitting the brand personality very well and easy to adapt to our 360 degree activation platform, including promotions, POS, online games and sponsorship.
High Five, AbdulMouhsen!
