Candid

The Young Guns x Diageo Brief requested delasign to create either a product, brand or advertising campaign that would be of interest to Diageo.

To answer to this brief, Oscar partnered with Ioannis Dimitroulas to form a lean and agile multidisciplinary team, that covered brand, product, experience, marketing and strategy; with the vision of delivering to all three requests.

Though we were given thorough data as part of our brief to work with, it was essential to take our understanding of the subject matter to the next level. That’s why we delved deeper into market research, the competitive landscape and the latest material science – all to make sure we could make as much of an impactful, yet realistic solution.

We needed to find a statement that encompassed all of our efforts. What is the question we were looking to answer with the brief? What message were we trying to convey with our final output?

Our response:

“How can Diageo lead the change towards conscious consumption of spirits by catering to the needs of the mindful consumer?”

We narrowed down our audience to who we believe would be our most interested customer group. This was to ensure we were consciously designing to suit the needs of our target demographic and psychographic group.

Following IDEO's methodologies, we built on the findings of our research of our target audience and created 4 How Might We's that reframed our insights, turning challenges into opportunities for design.

To ensure that we would stay on track as the creative process took us left and right, we created design principles. These design principles are solutions in the form of quick, memorable recipes that helped describe the most important elements and gave integrity and form to the vision.

By marrying our target audience, our design principles, our north star strategy and the research - we established our brand narrative and raison d’être. This is because a truly successful brand needs to have a reason for being that customers can relate to and believe in.

With a mission in mind, we pieced together the crucial elements that make up our brand:

• Brand Essence
• Brand Personality
• Emotional Benefits
• Rational Benefits
• Functional Benefits.

Suggested by our Material Expert, Dr. Andrew Dent, the philosophy was to create a bottle that is manufactured with 100% recyclable materials which, via chemical (not mechanical) recycling can be eternally used - creating a bottle-to-bottle system.

“77% of the US population owns a smartphone. One of the top uses of smartphones while in a store is to research product information and compare prices in other stores.”- Retail Dive

Our trendy, eye-catching cap design includes an NFC chip which allows users to research our product on demand and serve as a topic of conversation.

All you need to do is tap your phone onto the cap to be sent directly to the open database. There you can find all the information you need on ingredients, brand story and sustainability data.

We envisioned a website that offers transparency on the product at hand.

This website would read from an OpenSource database, whose datapoints are captured at every step of the manufacturing chain, allowing us to bring consumers as close to the process of creation as possible.

We designed a series of ads based on four key themes:

• Transparency
• Showcasing the Range
• Ingredients
• Sustainability.

Based on these themes, we created a series of Out of Home visuals to demonstrate the product in a live environment - showcasing its appeal in a subway setting, an outdoor setting and a bus-stop visual.