Old Navy - Packaging Revitalization

The Challenge: Old Navy first entered the Greek market in 1934. For the last 20 years, however, the brand had been commanding only a 0,4% market share. Despite its small market share and usage, the Old Navy brand enjoyed high awareness nationally. In fact, it is a “cult” brand in Greeks minds. The brand exudes authenticity and is considered to be one of the most original and traditional Greek brands. In an effort to strengthen its brand portfolio, Papastratos, the largest Greek tobacco company and owner of the Old Navy brand, decided to revitalize it. The goal was to attract new smokers and at the same time retain current users.

The Solution: Revitalizing a “cult”, authentic brand is always an extremely challenging task. As a first step, the Old Navy Brand Triangle™, a Brandessence / CBX strategic tool, was developed. Authenticity, modernity and quality were identified as the three most critical desired image attributes. All three attributes had to be creatively “translated” in a unique way in order to build an approachable and appealing brand identity and not simply a modern version of an old, cult brand. Although Old Navy, as a local brand, is a value brand, we turned the tables when it came to dealing with the “value for money” attribute. We aimed at communicating “value for money” by creating an approachable identity, built on the familiarity of the brand’s symbols of heritage and not an identity with more “mass appeal” that follows the visual cues of other cigarette value brands. Our approach found strong opposition from the client. Consumer research came to our rescue and supported our approach. Our goal was to bring into the brand’s look what we called “sophisticated simplicity” and place the brand against the market leaders and not the local and international value brands. The final brand identity, uses very few branding symbols. The outcome is a clean, “minimal”, yet rich brand identity. All branding elements on the pack have “a purpose of being” and link the brand’s heritage to the present times. In research consumers evaluated the new pack’s communication by reiterating Old Navy’s Brand TriangleTM as we defined it and creatively translated it, almost word by word. The new brand identity received high scores on the appeal scale and was perceived as holding its ground, at least visually, against the market leaders. Old Navy currently enjoys a 3% market share.