VFX Parle Agro marks 30 years of Frooti with a refreshed look; NY-based Sagmeister & Walsh assist in rebranding -

Parle Agro marks 30 years of Frooti with a refreshed look; NY-based Sagmeister & Walsh assist in rebranding

This summer, Parle Agro is completely set for a national launch of the new Frooti packaging designs accompanied with pan-India marketing campaign introducing ‘The Frooti Life’ to all its consumers.

The rejuvenated visual identity, including logo design and packaging aims to demonstrate Frooti as bold, fearless and iconic along with establishing its equity amongst a much larger audience to help it acquire a wider consumer base.

Frooti has always been way ahead of its time since its inception in 1985. Be it the launch of the first ever Tetra Pak, PET bottles, TCA triangular packs or Bottle Packs, it has always strived to remain relevant to the youth.

However, considering the huge popularity of Frooti as a kids drink, the only way to break away from the past was to undertake a radical brand makeover.

When the company behind one of India’s most popular beverages, the mango drink Frooti, approached New York-based studio Sagmeister & Walsh to create an extensive branding campaign to pair with its new Pentagram-designed logo, the pair travelled to India to get a sense of its advertising landscape. “We noticed how most of the advertising and billboard campaigns used a similar formula: images of people or product shots with lots of copy,” Jessica Walsh, art director of the campaign, wrote in an email. “Everything is calling for your attention in the same language. Some places in Mumbai felt like an advertising graveyard.” Frooti’s new logo is its first in 30 years (many consumers are not happy about the switch), and Sagmeister & Walsh wanted the campaign stand out from this busy, homogenous landscape.

Frooti’s parent company Parle Agro chose to rebrand the drink as it is launching a new juice formula, which uses more mango juice pulp. To announce the improvement, the company wanted to give the brand a new look that would separate it from its largest competitors, like Maaza (a Coca-Cola-owned fruit drink brand) and Slice.

Sagmeister & Walsh’s solution was to create a miniature world. They used tiny scaled models of vehicles, little people figurines used for railroad train sets, and real mangoes. It was all shot by artist and photographer Henry Hargreaves, who excels in using food as an artistic medium. For the commercials, these worlds were all stop-motion animated. “Only the Frooti packaging and mangos were kept in real life scale,” Walsh says. “This allowed the packaging and the mango to appear as the hero of the shots while allowing us to tell stories and add moments of humour in the images.” In the various videos, mangos watch cricket, fall in love, and douse themselves in colour for the Holi Festival.

Even one of the world’s richest movie stars, ‘King of Bollywood’ Shah Rukh Khan, appears in lilliputian form in most of the Frooti commercial (Khan is the brand’s celebrity ambassador), for which Sagmeister & Walsh collaborated with filmmaker and artist collective 1st Avenue Machine and animation collective Stoopid Buddies Stoodios.

The stop-motion animation was a painstaking process. “We had each character in the film 3-D printed in every single pose they were in during the commercial,” Walsh says. They designed every detail down to the clothes each figurine wore. Some characters, like the miniature Shah Rukh Khan, had 30 poses. “It would have been much easier to animate the entire thing in post-production, but we wanted to do it with stop motion photography to give it a quirky and endearing look to the animation style.” A two-second scene in the film could take more than two hours to shoot. According to Walsh, Frooti director Nadia Chauhan said that India hasn’t seen this style of stop motion style animation in commercials before. Walsh hopes the technique and this miniature world becomes a reusable visual language for the brand for years to come.

In addition to the commercial, Sagmeister & Walsh designed brand extensions like a Frooti recipe website, which is designed to appeal to older consumers; a social media strategy; fruit-filled GIFs; and Frooti games.

The move is in line with the brand’s vision to make in-roads into new consumer groups especially amongst the 15-30 year old young adults.

While Frooti has always held a dominant market share in the TetraPak category particularly amongst kids, the launch of fruit drinks in PET bottles in India expanded the target consumer base to teenagers and young adults. Today, the acceptance of PET and its growth is one of the fastest in beverage industry and contributes to 50 per cent of the overall Rs 6000 crore Mango Drink market. Keeping this at the core, the time was right to relaunch Frooti in a bold new look to be able to establish a strong foothold in the PET segment.

With this, a new structural design for Frooti PET has been developed to provide better strength, superior grip and a larger label area for branding. Even the formulation has been enhanced by increasing the food pulp so as to provide a more mouthful experience to the consumers.

The new Packaging Design which was rolled-out in mid-January for select SKUs alone has shown a growth of 60 per cent and seen a 80 per cent boost  in visibility as of today.

Speaking on Frooti’s relaunch, Parle Agro JMD & CMO Nadia Chauhan said in a statement: “Since the brand has been an integral part of everyone’s growing up years, it was important to shed the traditional Frooti image and give it a bold and contemporary look to make it relatable to the youth of today and tomorrow. It is really encouraging to see markets response to the brands new visual identity, as also evident from its positive sales impact. We are extremely confident of achieving our brand and business objectives through this strategic move.”

According to trade analysts, spends to the tune of Rs70 crore have been invested across a strategic mix of media vehicles that appeal to teenagers and young adults. Television will play the role of the lead medium for the campaign, where the TVC featuring Shah Rukh Khan, shot in stop motion style animation will offer a delightful visual experience. Amit Trivedi and Amitabh Bhattacharya have added a strong musical element to the TVC, which will soon roll out.

VFX