There’s been a boom in recent years in personalised health products. You can take tests to assess your general health, delve deeper into your family’s genetic history, or just get help with the right kind of vitamins to take.
But until now, very little of this has been geared to vegans. In fact, you’d tick a box and get ‘the vegan variant’ – and that would be about it. Meanwhile, thousands of people are switching to a plant-based diet – and many people feel amazing when they do – but others just don’t find it that easy. Some are simply more genetically susceptible to nutrient deficiencies than others.
So when approached to help position, name and brand a nutrition service for vegans, based on DNA, blood and saliva tests, we were sold. We wanted to help them supply vegan facts, not fiction, help find out what peoples’ bodies were missing, and help supply a level of personalised information that simply wasn’t there.
Finding a name wasn’t easy – we looked at many hundreds of variants. Eventually the answer stemmed from the simple phrase ‘find your vegan mojo’ as we realised that vegan + mojo = Vojo. Short, memorable, appropriate and trademarkable. (The four most important criteria for a good name).
The brand identity is based on a handwritten logo and a family of fruit, veg and nuts. We discovered that by taking the ‘ojo’ from the logo (which looks a little like eyes and a nose) we can then create a crazy little world of vegan-friendly characters. Jumping peanuts? Running radishes? Balancing blueberries? Vojo has them all.
With simple animations pretty much every character can come to life.
We’ve developed a brand toolkit that leads strongly with the characters, and then supports with softer colours and simple typography. For times when Vojo wants to feature photography and recipes, there’s a simple style to follow for that too. The tone of voice is straightforward, encouraging and all about explaining, not blinding with science.
Here’s the brand in action in digital media, mail-packs and outdoor advertising.
The team
- Positioning, naming, brand identity: Johnson Banks
- Illustration: Perry Rowe