Bannistar carried out all of the branding for the paper barrier material SHIELDPLUS made by Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd.
As a major paper manufacturing company in Japan, Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd. not only boasts having the largest market share in the Western paper department in Japan, but also advocates a comprehensive biomass business and produces various product other than Western paper with wood as the raw material.
Among their products SHIELDPLUS, a new material derived from paper developed for the field of barrier substrates (base material to block smell, vapor, etc.) used mainly for food products. The project started in order to acquire higher recognition as an unprecedented material with a barrier performance close to plastic while having a higher environmental performance.
As a new genre of product, the introductory examples for SHIELDPLUS are scarce, and it is does not enjoy much recognition.
Even for existing customers, because we had conducted communication focusing on practical aspects such as cost, there was no value system for linking emotional relationships as a brand or representation to appropriately convey them.
It was necessary to redefine the value and develop emotional communication to expand awareness while keeping existing customers and setting new targets that would emotionally empathize with the brand.
Bannistar held workshops to discuss the new target customers for SHIELDPLUS with project members.
SHIELDPLUS is a material that has the potential to greatly contribute to solving environmental problems including plastic marine waste. From that fact, we decided to target to entrepreneurs and business owners with visions to improve society through their businesses, and conveyed its value as a new material with the potential to improve society.
In the brand statement, we aimed to break away from messages that seemed to be like eco materials until now, such as sounding the alarm on environmental issues, and created a message that fosters a sense of expectation that the future will head in a better direction with new materials. By moving the targets emotionally and creating a social movement, we aim to encourage a change in mentality for business partners who have been conservative in adopting new materials.
We have also formulated brand logos, typefaces, color palettes and graphic devices to unify and express the world view of the brand.
For the brand logo, the colored line added above the word visually shows that SHIELDPLUS is a material made by coating a barrier layer on paper.
Furthermore, as a graphic device mainly for use in key visuals and advertisements, it adopts an oval and strip shape that depicts a "barrier". Based on the production concept of a "barrier that updates the future", it depicts SHIELDPLUS making people's lives and the world better through a world of bright watercolors spreading across the "barrier".
Our company developed the barrier material SHIELDPLUS using paper, an eco-friendly product, as a base. Since development, we have focused on B2B-like marketing communication, but through the project with BANNISTAR, we decided to imagine the world view with SHIELDPLUS being used and convey that thought in words and visuals. I think that it will be serve to a encourage memories when each person makes a choice or action concerning the brand.
Tomoo Kaneko, Packaging Communication Center, Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd.
