Conagra's Creative Design Breakthrough with Passionfruit

Background: 

Conagra Brands, a venerable giant within the packaged foods industry, sought to rejuvenate its trade and B2B marketing strategies with Passionfruit. Operating from Chicago and embedded deeply within the American grocery landscape, Conagra offers an extensive assortment of products spanning frozen, refrigerated and off-the-shelf categories, including household favourite brands like Slim Jims and Birds Eye. The need for a modern, different perspective on their current creative designs and branding assets brought them to Passionfruit's doorstep.

Challenges:

‍Fluctuations in Seasonal Demand 

Conagra's internal design team faced bandwidth challenges due to the volume of urgent seasonal requests made by brand teams. From trade marketing requests at the beginning of the calendar, to urgent product packaging updates, the small team juggled diverse design needs across their entire product range.

‍Complex Stakeholder Networks

Projects within Conagra typically involve intricate collaboration across multiple stakeholders, including brand teams and often partnerships with celebrities, like Dolly Parton. Whilst it is of huge weight to hold such profiles as ambassadors, high creative standards are a requirement. The challenge for Conagra’s designers is to satisfy a complex matrix of approvals and maintain alignment with the brand’s core values.

Specialized Design Requirements 

As with any food product, stringent regulatory & labelling laws in the industry have bespoke requirements, which calls for specialist knowledge on the intricacies of product labelling. Similarly, technical expertise and understanding of producing graphics for material products at shelf face is vital. 

Solutions

Traditional Design with a Modern Twist

Family favourite baking brand, Duncan Hines, partnered with Passionfruit to build out their annual sales magazine for their brand and field sales teams. With a knack for traditional media, the specialist effectively balanced creative intuition within the brand's established identity, developing a state of the art magazine, and in doing so impressing partners and senior stakeholders at Conagra (including Dolly herself!).

‍Packaging Innovation 

The launch of family-sized offerings from frozen food subsidiary brand, Evol, required unique packaging designs that communicated the quality of the products before expanding into CostCo. Passionfruit provided Conagra with a designer that had expertise in translating digital assets into tangible, appealing packaging, adept in 3D artwork and understanding the nuances of primary packaging design.

Urgent and Reactive Resourcing

Responding to urgent regulatory changes, Passionfruit added yet another designer to the mix, to support a rapid redesign of product labels, ensuring compliance and aesthetic appeal without disrupting market presence.

Results:

1.Enhanced Market Adaptability: 

Conagra tapped into Passionfruit's network of creative specialists to help them quickly adapt to peaks in seasonal demand. The efficient process of working with a Passionfruit specialist allowed a household American brand to work with the agility of a startup. 

2. Stakeholder Satisfaction:

The executive leadership at Conagra were impressed with the recently implemented redesigns and new marketing material. The specialist received an exceptional level of approval and enthusiasm for their work.

3. Retail Impact:

The strategic design solutions not only satisfied internal stakeholders but also strengthened Conagra’s positioning in key retail outlets, improving their brand visibility and consumer engagement.

Key Learnings:

The collaboration underscored the value of integrating external expertise to enhance in-house capabilities. Passionfruit’s ability to swiftly onboard specialists adept in specific creative processes empowered Conagra to navigate complex challenges and achieve a high degree of customization and innovation in their marketing efforts.

Conclusion: 

Through targeted solutions that addressed unique challenges, Passionfruit’s specialists delivered not just creative assets but strategic enhancements to Conagra’s current branding initiatives. This has fostered a new level of success and acceptance among top executives of the American conglomerate.

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