CPB and Design Bridge flavour for Nescafé brand

Nestlé this week relaunches its Nescafé Gold Blend instant coffee, in a bid to reclaim the brand’s premium status and attract younger consumers.

The £4m initiative has seen Coley Porter Bell revamp Nescafé Gold Blend’s identity and graphics, and Design Bridge update its structural packaging. The packaging is now being implemented globally across Nescafé premium instant coffees including Blend 37, Black Gold, Alta Rica, Cap Colombie, Kenjara and Espresso.

Nescafé Gold Blend senior brand manager Jane Aldridge briefed Design Bridge to ‘modernise’ the brand’s glass jar and strengthen its appeal to a younger audience, consultancy creative director, 3D design Neil Hirst says.

‘When we were appointed in 2000, the jar had been around for years [it was introduced in 1997] and had been designed in-house. It lacked the finesse that we subsequently added and appealed to the 45-plus age range. We wanted to move it down to consumers in their late 20s.’

The redesigned jar retains Nescafé Gold Blend’s signature ‘waisting’, but executes it in a more ‘refined, feminine way’, Hirst maintains.

CPB creative director Stephen Bell says the new-look identity and graphics aim to differentiate the brand in a category ‘saturated by copycat “gold” packaging. The original packaging is basically a golden scoop and a pile of beans. It’s old-fashioned and generic, and the image is just not compelling any more to a younger generation,’ he says.

The identity now boasts bespoke typography and taps into the language of fine jewellery with a hallmarked gold coffee bean. ‘The idea was to create a single-minded icon, and we loved the idea of creating something precious. We wanted [the graphics] to say, “This is the best; this is the gold standard”,’ Bell explains.

He adds that a brown background, which enables the coffee bean to ‘stand out’, and the application of the Nescafé branding on the vertical, enhance the product’s ‘premium’ status.

CPB, which started work on the project two years ago, was also responsible for Nescafé’s global identity overhaul in 2002 (DW 25 April 2002).