LONDON, UK — Avon, the global cosmetics company founded 137 years ago, appointed creative agency Free The Birds to transform its brand identity to better reflect the brand’s new ‘Embrace your Power’ positioning that launched in January 2023.
Following an initial brief to reinvigorate Avon’s packaging design, global brand partner Free The Birds conducted a deeper audit into the current positioning of Avon globally and recognized that its identity had been diluted over time and had become inconsistent across platforms.
The solution was a branded house approach: one cohesive strategy with a new visual identity for all brand channels and applications to exist under.
The re-energized brand world spans across visual and verbal identity, including a new hallmark logo, packaging design, website, and social media assets. Brand equities include brand color, primary typography, and other brand elements including photography style, advertising layouts, brand guidelines, and brand visual personality. All of these ladder up to Avon’s new ‘Embrace Your Power’ brand positioning launched earlier this year by Wunderman Thompson. The result is a new visual identity that celebrates the brand’s belief that every woman is born with her unique power.
Free The Birds housed the hallmark in a strong plinth shape with a strong color. The impactful ‘iconic power pink’ is optimistic, bold, and mobilizing and also reflects brand values, such as the brand’s longstanding commitment to the breast cancer cause. As well as using new brand colors to reflect Avon’s new positioning, Free The Birds partnered with Dalton Maag to evolve the typeface for Avon, remaining true to the original to ensure brand recognition, but refining the font to create more balanced letterforms.
The rebranding campaign is rolling out now across Europe, the Middle East & Africa, South Latin America, North Latin America, and Asia Pacific territories.
Nick Vaus, Partner and Creative Director at Free The Birds commented: “Avon is an iconic beauty brand with true purpose on a global scale. But like all heritage brands it needs to stay relevant and that requires purposeful transformation. It became very obvious very quickly the power and potential a total brand identity refresh would unlock. Partnering with the team at Avon to engage with this new look and feel has been a truly wonderful experience.”
Kristof Neirynck, CMO at Avon, added: “Our unique value proposition for customers is the personalized beauty services and advice by someone in their community who really knows and understands their needs. The aim of this rebrand was to celebrate Avon’s USP in the market which has always focussed on creating products that help our customers feel the best version of themselves.
“Working with Free The Birds allowed us to bring the Avon brand in line with this bold level of multi-channel transformation, and we’re thrilled with the outcome of the collaboration on this project. The brand now matches the energy and empowerment that Avon brings to our employees, Representatives, and our customers,” Kristof concluded.
