Leadership Through Dialogue.
How do you elevate a brand in a functional category?
Scope
- Strategy
- Packaging design system
- Structural packaging design
- Point of sale
- Prototyping
- Production
Mustang Survival
Marine safety gear, especially PFDs (personal floatation device) are sold like a commodity, with few people asking for a product by brand name.
Using superior packaging design and merchandising to show off the technical attributes and fit of the product, Mustang Survival appears as a clear category leader.
Previous in-store experience
"I want a Mustang"
Through extensive retail visits; observing shopper behavior, customer intercepts and in-store sales staff interviews, three things became clear.
- Most customer purchases are based on necessity, coming into stores saying “I need a PFD” vs a brand name purchase.
- The packaging and retail presence reflected this attitude with a functional and technical engineering approach, which gave no differentiation between brands, and created a challenge to decipher between crucial product uses and attributes.
- The superior quality and design of Mustang Survival’s gear was not apparent.
The objective of the project was clear, change the customer need from “I need a PFD” to “I want a Mustang”.
