Positioning and redesign for a coffee brand

Tasty Coffee is not only a production, but also an entire ecosystem for wholesale and retail clients, which includes a functional personal account for wholesalers and an informative blog in which retail clients and simply specialists and coffee lovers can share their impressions and information about coffee with each other. coffee. Coffee “activists” and “specialty promoters” come from Izhevsk.

Company employees control the path of coffee at all stages: from farmer to cup. The brand is developing multi-channel and diversifying sales channels, building a real online + offline coffee ecosystem.

Tasty Coffee turned to Linii to develop a strategy, update the identity and create a design system for packaging.

Mikhail Sharov, director of Tasty Coffee, comments on the project: “Last year we realised that it was time for us to change and set Linii agency the task of clarifying the positioning, refreshing the brand and making the design more modern. At the same time, we wanted to preserve recognition as much as possible: not change colors.”

The agency’s strategists immediately outlined the brand’s positioning territory: Specialty culture is about knowledge. Linii often use Archetype theory in their strategic work. The theory identifies 12 basic images that are understandable to a wide audience, based on the collective unconscious. This theory was originally formulated by the famous psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, and then it was adapted for business. Archetypes help classify images and behavioral patterns and, in general, are a way of adding “humanity” to a brand.

It was logical to assign Tasty Coffee the archetype of the Sage, but not an elderly professor with a gray beard, but a young genius who simplifies the complex and brings this knowledge to the masses. Tasty Coffee is a seasoned coffee expert. Curious, constantly searching for new knowledge about coffee and developing new products that he shares with others.

The brand image is based on insight: “…Coffee for me is a significant hobby/work of my life, in which I want to develop and become more experienced day by day.”

The essence of the brand is formulated briefly and aptly: CoffeePedia is a knowledge base about coffee.
The brand acts as a guide to the world of coffee, which will help you find your taste, “upgrade” your understanding of coffee culture, and even create your own coffee business.

When developing the identity, it was important to preserve the brand’s DNA, consisting of a logo familiar to consumers and contrasting black and white corporate colors. But at the same time, the design needed to be refreshed, made modern and relevant, reflecting the new positioning.

Julia Plotnik, creative director of Linii, talks about the special Tasty Coffee font: “The basis of the updated identity system was the font solution, for which the variable font Tasty Coffee was developed. The font dynamically expands and contracts, changing the height of the letters and the weight of the typeface, thus conveying a metaphor for the expansion of coffee culture and the role of the brand in these changes. This flexibility makes the typography unique and recognizable.”
The signature Tasty Coffee font was specially designed with type designers Nick and Svetlana Nedashkovsky.

As part of the project, the tone of the brand’s verbal communication – ToV (Tone of Voice) – was also worked out with its basic principles: expertise, logic, attention to detail. Also, in addition to packaging, visual principles of digital communication, posm, and sticker packs were developed. All these points were recorded in the brand book.

Mikhail Sharov, director of Tasty Coffee, comments on the result of the collaboration: “It seems that it turned out very great. Especially the new stretchy brand font.”