Gillette: Re-Brand project

The first project for the second year was to re-brand one of the top 100 companies in the world. We had to choose this company, and define a reason for a purposeful re-brand; one that we could justify and one that we could show through various forms of design and research & development. For this project, I chose the masculine brand Gillette.  For this re-brand, I thought about how the famous slogan 'The best a man can get' could be applied for everyone...why can't Gillette be the best anyone can get? This was my starting point.

                 From this starting point I decided about how I could make the products, and the brand as whole, appealing to women and yet still retain the masculine essence of what Gillette stands for. Another point I had thought about was making male specific products, female specific products, and products that could be used by both men and women, to show how diverse the brand can become. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was push the male consumer market away whilst trying to entice female buyers. So, this requires me to think about the design of the packaging (the colours, font/text and layouts), how the slogan can be applied to products and the brand name, website re-design, magazine advertisements, and most importantly the recreation of Gillette's logo. Again, all these factors have to be considerate of the male, female and unisex markets.

To begin with, I wanted to recreate the logo, changing the font for the whole name and the G which has come to represent the brand on worldwide media. I went through various design stages to reach a final. I wanted my final to still retain the masculine boldness of male tradition, and yet try and incorporate sleek and curved essences that I want to represent the feminine market. In the end, I chose the font Avante Garde Bold, and changed several of the corners from sharp to round and curved, giving it a friendlier feel. To represent the male, female and unisex products, I changed to colour of the logo on each product. The males was a cyan blue, the female was pink, and the unisex was purple. Simply because blue and pink are stereotypical and the purple is blue and pink mixed together.

As my logo was finally created, it allowed me to visualise how the products would look, what sizes the logo could be used at and how the new brand could be promoted through various applications, such as web use, magazine designs, and packaging designs. First I created packaging designs to demonstrate how the logo would be used, and also to demonstrate how different the packaging styles are from male to female products. The razors are for males and females specifically, and the packaging design for foam / gel below shows how a unisex product would look on the shelf. For this application of the logo, and for the others throughout the project, I created a QR bar, so when people scan these designs, it take you directly to www.gillette.com. 

After doing these designs, I looked at magazine advertising, primarily the magazines 'Men's Health' a& 'Women's Health', as these will be the main magazines where advertising will be held for these products. I then created 2 different sized versions of the advert (as the 'Men's Health' also comes in a smaller sized magazine).

This was followed by a very small video I had help creating. The aim was to develop a very, very small teaser add for television advertisements, to try and make people think about what new brand it can be; and for those who know or guess that it's Gillette, it'll make them wonder why it looks different, and what is the purpose of the new looking Gillette. I used a lens flare on the flat G, to give the G that sharp, sleek, curve look and feel, and to me personally that shows advancement in a product or a design; very similar to eg. an Apple product.

The last thing I did was redesign the Gillette website. I thought about the language page, the home page, a male page, female page and a unisex page, all with varying links on them that range from product details to events Gillette is hosting or taking part in, and even a link about how normal people are getting involved in the product.

Language page.

Home page - Aim is to hover over each segment
and it'll open up the page you wish.

Male page.

Female page.

Unisex page.

On the whole, my re-brand was successful. My tutors told me I had found a problem and that I had solved it. Apart from a few issues with type, I had lovingly created a new brand for Gillette and that I had been successful. I was really happy with the feedback, considering that I felt I wasn't going to get anywhere with the project,