It’s been a very exciting year for the marketing department at Reliv with our rebranding efforts. So once we successfully launched the brand standards and the new logo, our next big project was to tackle our core product labels.
In the 20+ years of my marketing career, I’ve never worked for a company with a tangible consumer product. The St. Louis Cardinals was more of an experience; Charter Communications (cable TV and high-speed Internet) was more of a service evolving into a utility; at AVALA Marketing Sea Ray Boats was my major client but that’s not really a consumer packaged good; Maritz was b-2-b sales and marketing service model. So the label redesign was a very exciting opportunity for me.
Before the designers began concept one, we started with team discussion around a general label strategy. This really was a luxury to be able to redesign everything at once instead of one at a time. We could create a true line of products where they all look like they are from the same family, but each child has his own personality.
The labels had not changed since the launch of each product in the late 80’s through 2008. We launched a very cool, new, exciting product in February of 2011 called 24K. It was our first ready-to-drink product and featured a very modern and exciting label and was the first to feature our new label and color palette. The label redesign was an opportunity to build off 24K and create a balance across the line.
We wanted all the labels to appeal to a younger demographic and to people leading healthy active live but not alienate our core group of Distributors who skew over 50 and many of which are ‘sick and getting better.’
We wanted the labels to support cross-selling opportunities via common design elements.
Trust is one of our core values. We decided to create ‘trust’ icons for our 30-Day Money Back Guarantee, gluten-free and for the number of grams of soy protein.
We created a patent icon that would be consistent in design and placement across all patented products
We wanted consistent placement of the Reliv logo on all products so that at a glance your eye could scan and see the bold, circle logo on every can.
Considerations also needed to be made regarding the limitations of flexography printing. Because of budget and time resources we were not in an environment to research other label styles that would require changes to our internal manufacturing equipment.
Our next step was to create a mini-brief or personality profile for each product. We discussed the target audience, value prop and descriptors for each product. We put into words what we wanted the designs to deliver. E.g. ProVantage is our performance nutrition protein product. We wanted the label to ‘flex its muscles.’
We reviewed these strategy documents with everyone who would be involved in approving the concepts. This put the entire team on the same literal page of expectations.
We staggered the timeline for the new designs into batches based on manufacturing timelines. I factored in the travel schedules for all stakeholders to be sure that approvals would not be delayed. I also scheduled the first round of concept reviews for each batch weeks and months in advance to be sure we wouldn’t miss any dates.
I couldn’t have asked for the process to run more smoothly. The art department ‘knocked it out of the park!’ We flew through the approval process. Most of the first rounds of designs were approved with minor tweaks. The team pushed-back on a couple of designs (and rightly so) and the art department dug deep and gave us better designs. I am so proud of these designs. They are thoughtful, restrained and complex. We achieved everything in the strategic briefs and now they are getting rave reviews from the field. What a fun and satisfying accomplishment for me and my team.
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