Café OX, brewing a crossover brand to energize LATAM

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STRATEGY, BRANDING, DESIGN, ILLUSTRATION, PACKAGING

Café OX, Creating a crossover brand to conquer the LATAM market

How can consumer packaged goods brands find their place in saturated markets? It's challenging for new players to stand out and gain market share when multiple brands offer similar products. Many play it safe and fight over a sought-after spot. For our client, a new ready-to-drink coffee wanting to enter the LATAM market, we decided to take life by the horns and stand out on our own terms.

We conceived Café OX as a disruptive regional brand to challenge and compete in two categories: ready-to-drink coffees and carbonated energy drinks. OX is the first of its kind in Central America. A pragmatic cold-brew coffee positioned as a crossover brand to win over audiences from both spaces, understanding the benefits both types of products bring.

We developed the creative strategy, naming, visual brand identity, packaging, and communication guidelines to help OX dominate the Latin American market.

The best of both worlds

OX is a ready-to-drink coffee, a category filled with dessert-like drinks mixed with milk and other flavours, often consumed to indulge in a sweet treat. But OX is also an energy drink, a category focused on high performance and endurance.

Beyond understanding the landscape in these two areas, the key was understanding the people consuming these products and identifying their behavioral insights. The brand speaks to an audience of university students, blue-collar workers, and athletes who need an on-the-go booster to continue studying, working, or exercising. So we focused people's attention on the benefits of the product, not necessarily the coffee itself.

In fact, we reframed coffee by referring to it as a natural energy source. This concept allowed us to address another consumer pain point: the adverse effects and reputation that energy drinks have due to their various chemical components. OX, on the contrary, has all-natural ingredients, proving to be a source of natural energy.

The result was a unique offer in the marketplace, an energy drink naturally made of coffee, something new in the LATAM market. A crossover between two categories providing benefits to a broader range of people.

Natural Energy

The brand strategy led us right to the big idea: Natural Energy. An umbrella concept that fosters the brand's verbal and visual identity.

OX provides its consumers with the energy they need to accomplish their goals. The brand's ethos is about seeing every challenge as an opportunity to better ourselves and prevail, to believe in the potential we carry inside, and grab life by the horns.

A ‘strong-as-an-ox’ name and brand identity

The brand needed a symbol of strength. After a thorough verbal and visual audit and research, we landed on OX. An ox is a powerful draft animal that delivers on its tasks. This is aligned with the product's promise to provide you with natural energy to perform like a beast.

This became our name and symbol. Name-wise, OX is cool and short, but at the same time, it feels grandiose. For the packaging, we used the silhouette of the ox as a container, allowing people to recognize it from a distance at the point of sale.

We used basic visual codes established in the coffee category, like dark brown and cream colors, to reference the product. However, we created differentiation by drifting away from how coffee is typically marketed. Here you won't find depictions of coffee plantations or a steaming hot cup. Instead, we used imagery used in the sports categories, allowing us to create a vivid and dynamic brand world that directly references the practical benefits of the product.

Taking LATAM by the horns

Café OX successfully launched in Central America in 2020 and instantly became linked to sports and dynamic activities, sponsoring weightlifting competitions, basketball, and football leagues, CrossFit events, and many more. This positioned the brand as a provider of energy. The exact objective we set out. Now, Café OX is preparing to conquer the rest of the LATAM market.

Like Café OX, we have created and launched brands in over 55 markets, repositioning, attracting new audiences, and ultimately helping our client's businesses grow to 7X.

If your brand is struggling to find its place in a saturated market or you are looking to launch, reposition, or add more value to your brand, let's explore your current challenges, and let us offer some insights to help you move forward. Click here to book a discovery session.