Via Design Related: Chiquita’s latest ad campaign imbues its audience with an instant sense of wonder. Using playful illustrations on stickers juxtaposed to the iconic Chiquita stickers, the product and brand become more engaging to the consumer—plus they just look cool. We got a chance to ask the Creative and Art Director, DJ Neff, some questions about the process of making bananas (even more) fun.
What can you tell us about creating this new campaign for Chiquita?
The process relied heavily in spending as much time with the product as possible. In this case it meant eating a bunch of bananas a day. Thankfully, I like bananas. In most of my work I like to immerse myself in the product and research as much as I can. In this case that emphasis was on the fruit and its cultural significance. After filling up on information, I let it all spill out in different ideas, drawings, sayings, photographs, then I start to figure out truths. It helps to start with the product and work outward, pulling from research and ideas to build upon the foundation.
The cornerstone of the campaign relied on the little blue stickers, the biggest icon for the brand. It wasn’t long before we had the idea to create the sticker characters. From there we thought about giving bananas personalities and how all bananas start out good but eventually go bad (and for consumers not to let that happen). When building the website we integrated this idea into its core. This gave the users opportunities to create their own banana personality and battle against bananas that have turned to the dark side.
