The challenge and the opportunity that emerged clearly from the beginning of this project was to capture the power of coffee and its trade to change the world – not in some ‘business vision’ kind of way, but to genuinely make a significant difference.

From the start we saw our understanding of the category, the business challenges facing cafe owners and the potential for branding as a unique experience and skill-set to leave our own legacy through successfully creating this new brand.

More specifically a brand strategy was required for Change Coffee that would engage with like minded cafe owners, with coffee drinkers who shared a social mindset, and solve the brand architecture requirements of World Vision.

From our first conversation it became clear that we were fortunate to have a highly experienced and skilled client and team to work with. Whilst the budget did not allow for us to develop the layers of brand strategy, naming and messaging we normally would, the World Vision project team took the lead and responsibility for these elements.

Working together through many hours of formal and informal conversation, the complementary skills and experiences of our clients set the foundation for the success of the project. Every conversation drilled deeper into the challenges, fed by our combined insights. As with many successful brand strategy processes, together we had to explore further, to ask more questions before the insights could be ordered into a successful brand strategy.

The solution was found at the intersection of a brand that: 01. provided a greater purpose for coffee drinkers, 02. provided a business system for cafe owners that provided a more profitable model, a stronger staff culture, a purpose and a legacy, 03. positioned itself as an authentic coffee brand, whilst 04. clearly understanding and communicating the impact it would have on the world.

We worked hand-in hand with the client to develop the brand architecture, understanding how World Vision’s first impact enterprise would work with the master brand, as well as understanding how the B2B brand would work alongside the B2C brand.

Together we reviewed the market (both coffee and impact business markets), as our client developed the layers of brand positioning and the brief that ultimately drove-out the name for the brand. We worked hand-in-hand to develop the layers of brand storytelling and brand messaging which can be read in all their glory on the Change Coffee web site.

From this strategic platform we developed the brand identity which leveraged the visual language of coffee brands as well as for purpose brands. The result is the kind of brand mark that has the power to start a movement.

Once we had refined the brand identity we turned our attention to the coffee packaging. Whilst the coffee is a B2B product, we always saw the packaging as being part of the B2C brand proposition for the cafe’s that joined the Change Coffee movement. As a result, the packaging design has a strong level of consumer engagement from design to brand story telling.

The brand identity system was designed to provide a flexibility of visual language. This is seen nowhere more prominently than the initial run of packaging. Launching with four  types of coffee, we developed a suite of four packaging designs that showed-off all the ‘range’ of the brand visual language.