NPD for a European pharmaceutical brand
Project Summary
Perrigo are a pan European pharmaceutical business which owns many well-known brands. XLS Medical, a weight loss brand comprising tablets & shakes, is one of their most successful.
Perrigo wanted to offer consumers more help on their weight loss journey, offering them the benefit of a pre-diet detox AND a means of maintaining their lower weight post-diet.
Reach created the packaging design for the European launch of 2 new products: XLS De-Tox and XLS Natural Control.
Reach is one of our preferred partners to work with when it comes to packaging design. Caroline and her team truly understand the crucial role packaging plays in today’s environment when it comes to catching the shopper’s attention.
Background
The 2 new products to be launched were:
- De-tox – a probiotic supplement, taken before a diet starts to facilitate weight loss
- Natural Control – a natural product made from prickly pear, that helps dieters maintain their weight loss, once dieting is over
The team were so pleased with our work on XLS Nutrition, they jumped ship from the agency they had been working with and asked us to pick up the challenge.
Challenge
We all know a) how hard it is to lose weight in the first place and b) how hard it is to keep the weight off that we do manage to lose. XLS were on a mission to help dieters achieve both.
If dieters de-tox their body before undertaking a period of dieting, their body will respond to the diet more quickly; so it made sense for XLS to extend its range into diet prepping by launching a de-toxing pro-biotic product.
Post diet is taken care of by an all natural product that controls & maintains by reducing the body’s calorie intake from fat.
Neither of these products is designed to make you lose weight so it was critical that consumers wouldn’t confuse these new products with the core range. We had to achieve the right balance of brand recognition and product differentiation.
Process
Helping the client decide early on in the project what colours and visual icons to adopt, meant the rest of the project ran smoothly.
De-tox
As the de-tox category is already established across Europe, it was important we took on visual cues that would help consumers navigate the range and recognise a detox product. We had to build these visuals cues into the XLS Medical brand architecture.
Unsurprisingly the cleansing effect of water was used by many of the brands already established in the category, but the use of pink was a bit of a surprise. Creating a pink arrow allowed us to flag difference from the core XLS Medical range whilst building on the brand’s visual equities
Outcome
The clean crisp clinical design of the new pack signals quickly to consumers the product benefit of de-toxing. Credibility comes from the microbiome technology symbol and the simple typography of the benefits – both countering the softening effect of the colour pink
Natural Control
With its natural proposition, it was critical the Natural Control product looked efficacious too.
With no established visual language to draw from (this product category is very new), we introduced green foliage to support the product’s natural credentials, whilst the direct arrow, powering forward in a straight line brought confident efficaciousness and a link to the master brand.
Learnings from this NPD packaging design
Packaging design is so valuable, you need to make sure every part of the design counts.
- The branding gives instant recognition to loyal consumers
- The overall green and imagery from nature resonates with consumers looking for natural products
- The gradation of green in the product name represents continuity over time
- What the product is for and when you take it gives instant understanding of what this new product is
- The arrow supports efficacy and communicates the product proposition
- The supporting information is presented in a clinical way thus further reassuring consumers of the efficacy of the product
