Featured image for Feast Your Eyes: Oikos is Energizing the Greek Yogurt Category with their Redesigned Blended Packs

Feast Your Eyes: Oikos is Energizing the Greek Yogurt Category with their Redesigned Blended Packs

by Theresa Christine Johnson on 07/27/2021 | 5 Minute Read

Remember when Greek yogurt used to be all the rage? The thick and creamy alternative to boring regular yogurt exploded, going from 1% of the yogurt market in 2007 to 44% in 2013. But the love for it has been less pronounced lately, what with skyr and cashewgurt making their way into the dairy aisles. So the team at Oikos decided to shake things up with a redesign to get people talking about their blended Greek yogurt.

“It was a huge effort to reinvent an entirely different Greek yogurt experience,” said Fe Amarante, senior creative director and head of brand design and brand elevation at Danone North America. “It was a pretty flat category in yogurt, and there was a lot of sameness around the experience.”

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Danone worked side-by-side with Beardwood&Co for the rebrand. Julia Beardwood, founder and CEO of the agency, said they looked to two other Oikos offerings for inspiration: Oikos Pro and the Oikos Triple Zero. They wanted to make the blended range fit in with these other Oikos options while still “boldly breaking boredom.”

“Oikos Pro and Oikos Triple Zero have a sense of boldness,” Julie explained. “They’re both black and white brands in an overall white category. And then we had Oikos blended, which was blue, and it just didn’t fit. So we wanted to shake up the category and also bring some unification and boldness to Oikos.”

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The Danone and Beardwood&Co team chose to approach the redesign in what Fe called a human-centric way. They worked quickly to prototype and start chatting directly with consumers, and those rich conversations guided their design.

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“We wanted to do things differently,” Fe said. Rather than develop a few different potential directions and then refine upon that or kick off with a big, formal presentation to the brand team, they went straight into the story and the consumer experience. “We couldn’t be in the office with each other anyway because of COVID. So why not do things even more differently? It didn’t make sense to approach it in the traditional way.”

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The bold products guided the bold redesign. When you open up one of the containers, it has a consistency, texture, and flavor that Fe believes is unlike any other Greek yogurt on the market today. That flavor and high quality needed to show through in the design.

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“When they told us that there was fifty percent more fruit in the product than had been in the blended product before, we knew ‘fruit-forward was definitely part of what we had to do,” Julia said. “Then there was also this side of the blended yogurt that’s very thick and creamy, and it’s a product made with love. During the project, we had a virtual farm tour to meet the cows and the farmers because Oikos and Danone work with family-owned farms. So the product itself is really, really good, and then there’s this proud transparency about how they make it and what goes into it.”

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The redesigned packs not only highlight the incredible ingredients, but they’re also sure to make you hungry. They feature vibrant, mouthwatering fruits (or, in the case of vanilla, a vanilla orchid) at the forefront, while the background is a dreamy swirl of yogurt. The look is uncluttered and stripped back so that the flavor is at the heart of it all. The packaging is enticing enough that you want to open the snack right up and pull out a spoon—or even a fork. Throughout the design process, the teams dubbed Oikos blended “forkable,” since it’s so thick you really could eat it with one.

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“You can eat it with your eyes,” Fe said. “I think we all crave authenticity and for brands to drop the bullshit and to be straight with us. The photography really heroes the fruit in an unapologetic, front-and-center way. In the CPG world, it’s really refreshing for you to see a product that's so mindfully created and that has so much substance and texture and fruit that it would be so bold as to give you this experience.”

As with any project, Oikos blended presented its own unique challenges. Julia said the expectations were high, and the timeline was short, so the pressure was on to develop something exciting, genuine, and eye-catching. Covid restrictions also meant they had to operate differently than they would, but that made the collaboration between Danone and Beardwood&Co even more satisfying.

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“Through this entire process, it was never in any way, shape, or form, a client relationship or an agency relationship,” Fe said. “There was no preciousness. I felt like there were real, genuine human connections. They didn’t just happen—we worked hard for that—but it meant we could go straight into getting the best-looking, most badass work without getting lost in power dynamics.

“I’m really proud of what we did, but I’m also happy that we had a kickass team that was able and capable and willing to work.”

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