Brand creation: Brand Definition / Brand Positioning / Brand Identity / Brand Tone & Language /  Packaging Design /  Website Design.

A quick Google image search for ‘donuts’ will bring up lots of photos of circular products sprinkled in multi-coloured ‘hundreds and thousands’ icing. The abiding image being a bit like a bakery crossed with a children’s creche.

That was the scenario that faced us when were were approached in our capacity of brand and identity design consultants to the food and beverage sector to create the brand and graphic identity system for a donut start-up brand.

The clients were two Brazilian guys with a small budget to get the whole thing off the ground, but they knew that brand was going to be vitally important to the success of their business start-up.

They told us that they wanted to called it Doughnuty. Which is a good, descriptive name in itself, but one that by itself was hardly going to create the level of stand-out and differentiation that they’d need to ensure success in such a competitive marketplace.

Our view was that we can’t just do a brand with a generic name and a colour scheme from a children’s play school. That was our strategic starting point.

Our first key intervention therefore was to adopt a phonetic approach to the name. The thinking being that if we’re going to be called Doughnuty let’s shorten it to a phonetic acronym – DNT … Dough-nut-y. The second intervention was to ‘own’ a colour – thus bucking the sector trend and creating another element of potential brand differentiation.

The brand identity system that we created was then applied to packaging, point of sale, clothing and online elements such as website and social media posts.

The brand that we created for DNT enjoys massive popularity and a strong online following. Sales are good and the start-up is already looking at expanding.