Lipton – Branded Environment

Challenge

The FMCG major Hindustan Lever Ltd., the Indian arm of Unilever Inc. was looking at making “Tea” a happening drink among youth through its leading brand, Lipton. The product basket was filled with new offerings of “flavored ice teas”, totally healthy & cool drinks. They approached us with this open brief.

Strategic Solution

The Elephant team conceptualized three retail formats for reaching out & spreading the presence of this brand. Flagship Tea Parlors, Express Parlors & Branded Kiosks. Flagship Parlors are planned to be more than 1000 sq ft and independent of co-branding. These would offer a complete youth experience along with a range of mixes, mock-tails & flavors of tea. These parlors would serve much more than what would be available off the shelf. Music, ambience, snacks, tea flavors and themes that would give a “High on life” experience.

The Express Parlors are smaller spaces of around 400 sq ft that could be placed as independent shops or also as zones within an office floor, a college canteen or a food mall.

The kiosks are meant for community or commercial spaces such as entertainment malls, petrol stations, airports, railway stations, movie halls etc. where there is a large footfall of youth.

Design Solution

We proposed to call the brand “t...”. A lower case t with three dots. This was found to be very apt for the generation-next that lives on phonetic spellings & sms lingo. The three dots were added to suggest that there is much more than tea. There is food, music & fun. The Lipton brand palette had a bright yellow & red. While these provided very good retail visibility, we needed a fresh, healthy & youth colour in the palette. So we introduced a lime green to get these attributes. Lime green also gave us an instant differentiation. The spirit of the brand is in the fun it can add in any format or media. For example, one of the coasters says “allMyt” or a large drink is named “infini t” or the tea cups have the brand printed inside so when you are drinking the beverage, you would literally find “t” inside your cup.
We used the alphabet to accentuate signs, menu cards, attire, lights & the glass façade.

We decided not to be blindly religious or rigid about the identity. Because youth culture is all about being easy & comfortable. So we have used a riot of fun fonts of lower case “t” on the glass façade as a texture. A table mat has a mix of games, puzzles, anecdotes & little known facts about tea, basically to have the audience engaged in a larger and differentiated experience.

Results

The first Flagship Parlor of “t” is launched in Bangalore. It is running successfully since October 2005. Response is very positive and aligns with the intent of the project. Lipton plans to launch over 100 such branded retail places to provide the experience across India.

Saturday Activity :

Lecture by Christopher Benninger

It was an honour for us to have architect Christopher Charles Benninger with us on a Saturday evening. Harvard & MIT alumni, Christopher has made India his Karmabhoomi for over 33 years with outstanding projects winning international recognition. He has prepared plans for the Governments of Bhutan, Nepal, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India. He has designed institutions, residential schools, business and luxury hotels, corporate headquarters and large scale housing projects. He shared with us a project on the urban development of Bhutan's capital city, Thimpu, a part Bhutan's journey to democracy. His remarkable experience & insights on living cultures shared over a glass of wine have been a great source of inspiration for us.