Functional is the new emotional
Pagani is a top 10 Italian pasta player globally and they are the number two European player in the Corporate B2B market. Pagani’s focus is creating tailored products for companies that either use them as an ingredient or sell them under a private label.
We admit it, at the beginning we’ve found the combination “B2B pasta” a little hard to get our heads around. Most of our immediate associations with Pasta brands were heavily consumer oriented. Indeed, when we visited the client at Europe’s largest food exhibition, we saw that the entire category was consumer oriented and, sadly, riddled with consumer clichés: Italian mamas, papas, smiling girls carrying bails of wheat in fields, you know the kind.
With a recent management overhaul, led by seasoned turn-around guru Peter Assembergs the company was facing a unique challenge. Pagani’s name is well known and recognised in the industry, but in an increasingly commoditised category and with a global crisis of rising prices of durum wheat, the challenge was demonstrating a real difference that highlights the company’s dedication to B2B manufacturing.
Emanuela Prina, Marketing Manager for Pagani tells: “As a large part from our Customers are international and as we aim at focusing more and more on the foreign markets, we wanted to co-operate with an Agency that was not so much involved with the typical Italian pasta clichés. Someone who brought a new approach. Brandinstinct came back to us with fresh ideas resulting in an innovative and effective project.”
As we started getting to know the client’s world, walking with them through their plant, and chatting over some great Italian pasta, we were blown away by the pride of the employees and their unbelievable perfectionism and attention to detail. Words like premium, high-end and quality, usually bog standard industrial clichés, suddenly received a whole new meaning when faced with a group of people who are obsessed with performance.
Our two main insights for this project were related. Firstly commoditised products can be inspirational, secondly B2B doesn’t have to be functional. Uri Baruchin, the consultant leading the project says: “B2B projects are often looked upon as boring and uninspiring. Maybe because they tend to push communications in a functional rather than emotional direction, unlike B2C projects where it is already standard to rely heavily on audience insights and emotional benefits.. As a matter of fact, while B2B marketing projects often result in generic communications, we believe it is only because you have to dig deeper and find the emotional beneath the functional. The allegedly performance-led, functional values are, after all driven by emotional values such as passion, commitment and a unique worldview. One only needs to look at famous Italian brands like Pirelli and Lavazza to see how commodities can carve out an emotive niche in the B2B sphere.
Pagani’s new brand, with a strategy focusing on B2B account holders and major buyers as a target audience, is highly differentiated from the rest of the pasta category. It emphasises the shared values of high performance that connect Pagani with its business target audience. Furthermore, this strategy still holds significant consumer appeal as discerning consumers will find the idea of using the same ingredients as world class restaurants and hotels appealing.
The new brand identity is simple yet bold, following a tradition of Italian design excellence. It brings to the front the commitment and uncompromising performance of the Pagani people. It smells of achievement. It combines the timeless design of the logo with custom created photography and illustration by top international talent from our creative network.
“My aim on Pagani was to create a brand, which is naturally contemporary and speaks confidently across all media.” Says Christoph Stolberg, lead designer on the project. “The goal was to create a simple modern identity, complimented by a distinctive illustration and photography style which emphasises quality of product and process. Longevity was provided by designing the identity system to be flexible and modular. Working with such a passionate client made the design process a pleasure, which I believe facilitated a successful result.”
In just under four months, Pagani launched their new brand in the recent Ciba food exhibition in Parma, Italy. Exposing a new business suite, brochure, catalogue, web-site and booth design, all designed by Brandinstinct.
The catalogue is an interesting case in point. It is inspired by the famous Pantone colour palette fan-style catalogues. Instead of colours, it show types of pasta with photos and scientific illustrations (recreated for the project in painstaking detail and adjusted to scale). The detail of the illustrations emphasise the level of knowledge, accuracy, obsession with detail and Pagani’s phenomenal product consistency. But this is much more than a marketing communication piece – full page versions are now used in Pagani’s food laboratory as a quality assurance tool.
Peter Assembergs, CEO of Pagani says: “Brandinstinct succeeded 100%. We feel very satisfied: we have been collecting enthusiastic comments both inside the company and outside, from our customers, suppliers and even from some kind competitors. The toolkit we were given by Brandinstinct is something very flexible and easy to use: we feel we can work by ourselves even on some new applications related to the ones we have received from them. What makes Brandinstinct different is that they are very good at listening, understanding and translating their customer’s needs. Working on a new identity is not a picnic. Thanks to Brandinstinct we didn’t live the stressful and demanding side of the project (I’m sure there was one…) we were involved on a regular base, effortlessly, and enjoyed many nice and challenging parts of the project. It was a lot of fun and satisfying every time we received news from them. “
When our clients at Pagani sent us pictures of themselves smiling and holding the new deliverables, fresh from the print house, we knew we’d done something right.