Background and Challenge
As a traditional festival lasting for thousands of years, Chinese New Year (CNY) has always been quite an important occasion for all brands.
As a well established Italian brand, the challenge to Ferrero was, how to maintain the brand’s well established international, premium, classic brand image, while at the same time, to fit well with CNY culture?
How to present the traditional CNY culture in a more modern way, that may be more preferred by current target audiences?
Design inspiration and solution
With having this task in mind, our design started from understanding Ferrero brand and the CNY culture.
As a brand rooted in China market for quite long time, Ferrero logo and its pralines were well recognized by consumers as well as its gold and classic look and feel.
On the other hand, to deeply connect with Chinese culture, our idea was to bring the Chinese festive essence to life so to resonate with consumers, which leaded us to search and interpret traditional festival elements, and among diverse elements, we discovered the Plum blossom and Folding fan, which bears a long history and great meaning.
Plum blossom, a long and beloved subject in the traditional painting and poetry of ancient China, is an auspicious symbol represents happiness, longevity, and the coming of spring, and has been frequently depicted in Chinese art and poetry.
Folding fan, also an auspicious symbol, is the most widely spread item in ancient times, almost everyone carried it around. And a special-designed folding fan can represent its owner’s personality and taste. Also, the word “fan” is homophonic with the word “kindness” in Chinese.
So plum blossoms were well spread on the folding fan like a decoration, dedicated and elegant, the Ferrero logo was designed to put in the center, and as the mark for the folding fan, pralines were not hidden by the packaging, naturally generating an invisible connection between Chinese culture and Ferrero brand.
Last but not least, we suggested one more way of presenting the products, instead of putting on shelf only, the way of hanging the products helped the brand shine on the shelf, this also echo with Chinese tradition of hanging auspicious item in the house to wish for good luck.
All of above thoughts put together, we created a pack that well resonated with Chinese consumers in CNY season. It helped not only the Ferrero brand to attract more attention, but also brought to life the CNY traditions to younger consumers. The brand recognition was well embraced by them, too.
