Unilever has decided to revitalise and reposition the Brooke Bond tea brand in Russia and other CIS countries towards reflecting more of its 137 years of English tea experience. Previously it was promoted as an energising drink to improve one’s start to their day – a role increasingly being played by coffee. Such a change in the brand’s positioning was necessary to keep it relevant in its product category. Thus a radical strategic change had to be reflected in the brand identity and package design, which MILDBERRY was asked to develop. For this project MILDBERRY created a multicultural team consisting of brand strategists and designers from its offices in Moscow, London and Brussels led by Oleg Beriev & Rowland Heming…

One of the project team challenges was to identify how truly “English Tea” is perceived by consumers. The MILDBERRY creative teams put together propositions and mood boards reflecting what it means to be “truly English” from their different national and cultural perspectives – a view from Moscow, London, and Brussels. This exercise helped to identify the focus for the creative work and was seen as being particularly useful by the Unilever team.

This showed that being English alone was not enough – it was neither unique nor defendable and consequently, the joint team agreed it had instead to celebrate a very particular Englishman. Fortunately, unlike all competitor tea brands, one such gentleman truly existed in Brooke Bond’s illustrious past: In 1870 Arthur Brooke, the company’s founder, was selling a bespoke blended English tea in his popular tea shop – his “bond” to his consumers was a guarantee of consistent quality. Over time his “Brooke Bond” trademark became well associated with an impressive black tea blend and the way he would distribute his teas to the best tea shops using horse-drawn carts to ensure that his customers received their tea timeously and in its best possible condition. This truthful story and uniqueness gives the brand a big competitive advantage, because black tea consumption in Russia and other CIS countries is extremely high, as the respect for the way the English developed the category over the last 150 years. Therefore, building on this the Mildberry team developed a Brooke Bond brand language with key brand identity elements and package designs for the whole product range. The new Brooke Bond identity elements became Arthur Brooke’s bonded stamp of guaranteed quality, a brass plaque to reflect the brand heritage of the original premises and finally the wooden texture of the background to reflect the original shipping cases of the imported teas included in Arthur Brooke’s blends. To ensure the brand’s authenticity, other genuine brand stories dating back over a hundred years have been historically researched and were understood to be key to the brand and this project. For instance a “Wooden Jack” has been used to identify the premium Ceylon tea in the range – derived from a wooden figure that used to stand in the window of Arthur Brooke’s original shop as an item of display to promote the unique blend when he first imported Ceylon teas into England in the late 1800’s.