Role: Creative Direction / Art Direction / Writing
The Finlandia brand was established in 1970 by Alko, Finland’s state-owned alcoholic beverage company. It is now owned by the Brown-Forman Corporation. They aquired a brand which had leveled off for years in their growth. They engaged us to rebrand them and uncover pathways to success.
A six-month comprehensive research initiative to uncover the brand’s core essence, positioning, and emotional differentiators through stakeholder interviews, market analysis, competitive audits, and customer insights. The process resulted in a clear strategic foundation that aligned the brand’s vision, voice, visual direction, and market opportunity.
To emphasize the findings we created a campaign called “naked vodka”. We decided to use “naked” in a positive manner. Intentionally poking at the common expected approach within the category which always leads with the objectification of women. By taking the opposite approach, we decided to not focus on women or men, just nature. So our definition of naked became: nothing to hide. We celebrated transparency, authenticity and revealing the real self.
Finlandia’s brand stories authenticate our natural purity positioning and give consumers reasons to believe in it. These short, but rich, narratives are real, memorable and authentic, and give dimension to the many aspects of Finlandia’s natural purity. Plus, they are unique to Finlandia, allowing us to speak about natural purity with an authority that no other brand can claim.
Through a process of immersion in their internal culture and qualitative research with their design target, we identified precisely why the Finlandia way of work resonated so deeply with their audience: Finlandia users value authenticity and heritage. This led to a unique design strategy that set the company up for the next decade of growth.
Finlandia engaged us to help design a dynamic and modular system to be applied to across the Finlandia brand, packaging, communications, advertising and
retail environments. Within two years Finlandia grew
to the second largest brand at Brown-Forman and became the number one brand in Poland.