When the management team at Omani egg producer, Dana Eggs, discovered they needed to change the packaging of their product owing to new UAE rules, it made them take a closer look at their brand image.
Sales of Dana’s eggs, which are available at most of the UAE’s main supermarkets, including Carrefour and LuLu’s, had been struggling amid intense competition, and the firm’s management decided that its long serving, but lacklustre packaging, needed reinvigorating.
Dana hired a small UAE-based design company, Breath Design, to reposition and revitalise the brand. “It [Dana’s brand] was becoming very dated,” Jag Patel, of Breath Design told RNME. “It didn’t have enough brand presence in the market. They just wanted to capture back some of that market share and generally appeal to a far more brand savvy audience.”
Part of the problem was that Dana’s brand and packaging had little in common with the message the firm wanted to convey, while consumers became increasingly fickle, according to Patel. “More and more people are now becoming aware of the products they buy into,” he said.
“It wasn’t really relevant to their brand and the way they wanted to push it forward and obviously to increase their distribution throughout the GCC they wanted a better package. They basically wanted to appeal to a much more international expat audience, and the main value they wanted to communicate to the consumer was freshness.”
In line with this, Dana also wanted to ensure its new design was original, and this meant avoiding imagery such as pictures of eggs on the packaging. “They use a vacuum form of packaging so you can see the eggs,” Patel said. “Even on the label design, a lot of the manufacturers here do put a picture of eggs on it. We wanted to find some other imagery that conveyed the idea of freshness.”
The design process took about three months, with Breath having to liaise with Dana, its printer in Switzerland and a packaging company. Dana is now preparing to launch its new design, which remains transparent, but has disposed of the airtight shrink-wrap, which can affect the freshness of eggs.
Breath Design has completely changed the label, and a new image of grass and blue sky, signifying freshness, replaces Dana’s old cartoon style design. While it will take at least a few months to assess the effects of the new design, which is due to be launched within the next few weeks, Dana’s managing director, Sandy McIntosh is convinced it will help boost sales.
“We expect an increase in sales because of the health factor,” he told RNME. “By eliminating the shrink film, there’s more air movement around the eggs and it keeps them fresher. It’s also a very fresh countryside type design. It’s completely different from anything else in the Middle East at the moment.”
But while Dana looks set to benefit from its new brand image, many FMCG products in the Middle East remain shy of reviewing such issues, despite the increasingly fickle consumer tastes, according to Patel. “It is difficult to get clients to understand the value of investing in their packaging design as customers from overseas do start to relocate to Dubai and are actually looking for that value subconsciously within the packaging design,” he said.
“It’s something that our clients are slowly starting to pick up on. It’s one of those ongoing battles to get clients to invest in their products at an early stage to reap the rewards when it’s on the shelf. That’s something that we’re constantly trying to educate clients about. Every time you revitalise it puts the message out there that you’re serious about your brand rather than just resting back on your laurels.”
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