A new blend, a new look and a new mission: to win back the hearts of Britain’s tea drinkers.
Boundless Brand Design, the London-based strategic and creative branding studio, has created a new brand world and refreshed packaging for PG Tips, one of the UK’s most famous tea brands. The new look launches alongside an improved blend and a new campaign, as part of a major PG Tips brand refresh.
PG Tips came to Boundless with a trust problem: years of change and inconsistency had unsettled loyal drinkers. Extensive consumer research identified taste and overall quality as the main drivers of purchase in the category. This was tackled with a new and improved PG Tips Original blend, which retains the brand’s signature rich and smooth taste profile, with a fuller flavour. But with the entire black tea category suffering from long-term decline, the brand needed a strategy that had to do more than reassure on taste and value: it needed to find its way back into its consumers’ hearts, quickly. So from very early on, the strategic decision was made to focus on rebuilding brand love. This meant bringing back hope, warmth and cheerfulness – everything loyal drinkers associated with PG Tips – into the brand.
The studio’s solution came from a simple thought: for modern tea drinkers, tea is a dose of daily optimism, and a very welcome pause in the midst of their stressful and frantic lives. But for PG Tips, it was the cornerstone of far more. Optimism was a feeling loyal drinkers had always associated with the brand, and while it still lived in the Live Life One Tea at a Time campaign, it had gradually vanished from both the pack and wider brand world…
To reignite that sense of optimism, Boundless Brand Design rooted the redesign in the welcoming world of the British home: a kitchen where the kettle’s always on, striped wallpaper lines the walls, and the treats will be out, without fail. These small-yet-delightful moments of character shaped ‘Welcome Home’, an idea that now defines how PG Tips looks and feels at every touchpoint. On pack, a charming illustrated world unfolds, filled with mug-shaped lights, tea-themed literary classics and baked treats matched to each blend. The tea leaves’ ‘tips’ also returned to pack: a clear signal of quality and a piece of much-loved equity the brand had lost along the way.
Designed to stand out on shelf and to win back hearts, the new PG Tips packs are rolling out across major UK retailers this autumn.
Hamish Shand, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Boundless Brand Design, says: “With heritage brands there’s always a temptation to look backwards, but heritage isn’t an aesthetic. The real value is everything a brand has accumulated over time: the memories, the rituals, the place it has earned in people’s lives. PG Tips has nearly a century of that, and what we found underneath it wasn’t a particular logo or shade of green. It was a feeling of optimism.
At its best, PG Tips has always had an incredible warmth to it: a unique blend of uplift and British humour. The opportunity was to bring that optimism back, and to create something that feels unmistakably PG Tips without pretending it’s still 1950, 1980 or 2000. Heritage isn’t about looking backwards. It’s about knowing what to carry forward.”
Heidi Williams, Marketing Controller PG Tips says: “Refreshing a brand as familiar and iconic as PG Tips takes real care. Boundless were fantastic partners throughout, combining a real understanding of our brand with fresh thinking and creative ambition. They connected our campaign, packaging and wider brand story into a distinctive, welcoming world that celebrates our warmth and optimism, giving our new and improved blend the look it deserves.”
The launch is supported by a campaign spanning trade and consumer PR, social media, bespoke shopper marketing, out-of-home advertising from November, sampling and retail partnerships. It builds on the return of PG Tips‘ iconic Monkey and the brand’s Live Life One Tea at a Time campaign.
Source: Boundless Brand Design
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