OU Teas
Pronounced: Oh you tease!
An audacious tea brand with a tone of voice that shouldn’t suit such a dull product and market.
OU: Wrong Place, Right Time.
Wrong Place. OU is a youthful brand. Full to the brim with youthful irony, dark sarcasm, and student like cynicism. That’s the sort of brand you’d expect from your favourite band, your go to spirit. And we’re channelling all that juvenile angst into teabags?
Right time. But as much as it feels wrong, the “sewn up” tea market is in desperate need of something refreshing. As young tea drinkers are clearly in decline, it’s about time for something which isn’t so dull.
Branding
CMYK. Just pure block colours. We’re not a brand concerned with getting hues that “reflect our brand’s complex essence” we just use CMYK like you’d get right out of your printer. Black on either Cyan, Magenta or Yellow. Uncomplicated, unpretentious, and very OU.
Conveniently the letters of our name form the shape of a teacup, in its most simple form creating a visual pun helping to relay OU’s playful side.
Social Activations
To allow our audience to actively and creatively engage in the brand and connect to its humour to allow for the all-important brand engagement, stickers can be peeled off the box. The idea here, is to allow our audience to stick these in the most random, inappropriate places they can and would be shared by OU on social media platforms. Wrong place, right time. This would hopefully lead to some organic social engagement both online and off.
Packaging
With elements upside down, our product becomes interactive for the consumer. Information is spread randomly around the box means that it essentially doesn’t have a front. Not only does this stand out from competitors but it creates an interesting user experience which they are likely not used to. This experience differs from normal as consumers in most shops are given whatever they want very easily and do not have to work. The boxes also have stickers on them ready to peeled off and placed wherever the audience wants, making the packaging more of an experience that connects to social activations.
Print Advertisements
The advertisement posters are intended to relay the brand’s tone of voice and its conventionally “wrong” place in the market through copywriting and placement. They are intentionally placed “wrong” in their frames and by breaking the design grid to express the chaotic tone of voice. All of which will lead to word-of-mouth advertising through subverting conventions.
OU will also be organising a series of promotional events alongside the standard forms of advertising. The event additionally plays on something you would not expect form a tea brand. Playing on the conventional idea of a “tea party” and completely subverting this by having a promotional event at a nightclub fitting into how our ideal audience socialise. Taking tea as a social morning ritual into an evening event. Wrong place, right time.
Video Advertisements.
Video advertisements consist of having a series of uncomfortable situations, relatable to the consumer, where someone is lost for words, so they sip their tea because they don’t know what to say. I.e., in the “wrong place” and the tea comes at the “right time”.