Pingo Doce packs given ‘daring’ look by Wren & Rowe

The consultancy was appointed to the retailer’s roster in December 2008 and given a brief to overhaul the chain’s entire range. ‘They wanted humorous copywriting and an emotive take on the products,’ says Paul Foulkes-Arellano, managing director of Wren & Rowe.

A Brazilian copywriter was employed to work with the consultancy on Portuguese language copy, which has been coupled with imagery that is meant to connote a geographic link to the product’s country of origin, according to Foulkes-Arellano. ‘It’s about telling a series of stories to engage and entertain the customer.
‘As the project progressed, the client wanted us to be more daring and more colloquial,’ he adds.

For a Mozambique King Prawns product, copy that translates to ‘Treasure from Mozambique’ has been accompanied by an image, taken by an amateur photographer and sourced from Flickr, of fishermen in Mozambique.

Foulkes-Arellano describes the imagery used across the ranges as ‘contemporary and “chefy”, with cookery book-style photography’.

The Portuguese sauces range carries the descriptor ‘our tradition’, and for apple strudel the tagline is ‘sweet sin’.

The rationale behind the choice of words is that ‘Portuguese clients are incredibly emotional,’ Foulkes-Arellano says. ‘They love to see emotion and narrative in the design work.’

A range of ‘world’ sauces depict ‘comical’ illustrations, created by the consultancy, which act as signifiers to show their indigenous origin.

The English sauce, (Worcester sauce) shows images of the Queen’s Guard with droplets of the sauce, while the peri-peri sauce uses African imagery and the soy sauce images of the Ming dynasty.

The delivery of the repackaged products follows a roll out of redesigned stores, part of a drive to make a more ‘modernised’ offer, Foulkes-Arellano says.

Pingo Doce Factfile

• Pingo Doce was established in 1980
• It is the largest supermarket chain in Portugal, with more than 340 stores
• The group employs around 17 000 people