Tasked with bringing the cherished soft fruit drink out of the shadow of its children's drink legacy – without losing its army of loyal customers – Pentagram designed a more sophisticated logo and packaging earlier this year.
Sagmeister & Walsh, meanwhile, took on the challenge of creating a bold visual language that would enable the campaign to stand out in India's busy advertising landscape.
On visiting India, partners Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh soon realised that despite the vibrant chaos plastered across every available ad space, most billboards seemed to use a similar language.
"There are lots of text-heavy ads, or straightforward images of people or product shots," explained Walsh, adding that differing sizes and formats of overlapping billboards add to the disorder.
The answer? To help Frooti stand out, Sagmeister & Walsh did what they do best, designing a bold, brilliantly simple graphic campaign, and injecting humor by creating a miniature world using tiny scaled models of vehicles, people and plant life.
Playing with perspective
The idea, says Walsh, was to make people smile. "Only the Frooti packaging and mangoes were kept in real-life scale," she explains.
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"This allowed the packaging and the mango to appear as the hero of the shots, while allowing us to tell stories and add moments of humor."
"We introduced four bold colors to the brand which complement the yellow of Indian mango and add a sense of playfulness across the imagery."
Sagmeister & Walsh also designed a number of brand extensions, including a Frooti recipe website, microsite, a social media strategy, Frooti games and a number of smaller stop-motion animations bringing the mango to life.
Telling a wider story
"The graphic language is very adaptable to telling all kinds of stories: already we've released little stop motion videos celebration the Holi festival, the win of the last Indian cricket team, and mangoes hugging for Valentines day."
For the television commercial, Sagmeister & Walsh partnered with Special Guest's Aaron Duffy and Marc Reisbig from 1st Avenue Machine – with a guest appearance from Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan during the live action scene at the end of the film.
"Every two-second clip in the commercial took hours to create. However we feel that the end result was worth it, the simple style of animation is endearing and its stylistically very different from what you currently see being done in India."
Of course, for thousands of people Frooti evokes fond memories of long summer holidays, childhood cricket games and happy school days. So have Pentagram and Sagmeister & Walsh hit the right note? Have they succeeded in helping Frooti grow up and appeal to an older audience?
We certainly think so – and we're looking forward to watching the campaign play out over the coming months. But what do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments below.
Julia is editor-in-chief, retail at Future Ltd, where she works in e-commerce across a number of consumer lifestyle brands. A former editor of design website Creative Bloq, she’s also worked on a variety of print titles, and was part of the team that launched consumer tech website TechRadar. She's been writing about art, design and technology for over 15 years.
