Asda launches a cheerful and “conversational” identity
The supermarket’s new branding will be seen across its Serious About Summer campaign, both of which were developed by Havas London
Asda, one of the UK’s biggest supermarket brands, has updated its visual and verbal identity in a bid to stand out from the competition, according to Havas London, the agency behind the new look and feel.
“Asda are in the lives of 19 million people daily – in their kitchens, living rooms, bathrooms … even their bedrooms,” says Nathalie Gordon, creative partner at Havas London. Yet over the past 20 years, it had been growing “without a clear design story”, adds Lorenzo Fruzza, the agency’s chief design officer. After launching the new endline ‘That’s more like it’ last year, it was time for a new “design north star” to match, he explains.
The Asda wordmark and bright green brand colour aren’t going anywhere, but a new deep green that borders on navy has been introduced, as well as a wider secondary colour palette.
One of the bigger changes is the new type design, created in partnership with type foundry Colophon. At the heart is a display typeface featuring “an attention-grabbing all-caps treatment, but incorporates unicase glyphs throughout to lend a conversational tone”, explains Fruzza. This aims to complement the new friendly verbal identity.
The overall style is in keeping with current tastes in food branding, namely the combination of thick, rounded typography, bright palettes, and sticker-like graphics, which have proven popular with brands big (Deliveroo) and small (Marcus Rashford’s Full Time). While sticker designs have become a convention of brand toolkits in the last few years, in Asda’s case there is a logical link to the idea of stickers being applied to products in a supermarket.
“Given how many supermarkets there are to choose from, ultimately the most important thing to achieve with this rebrand is to help audiences differentiate Asda from all the other noise and show that this is a brand putting customers, quality and value ahead of anything else,” says Gordon, who explains that this could only be achieved by “staying humble and true to the brand, not getting distracted and ensuring we stay true to Asda’s roots”.
The Havas team spent time ensuring the identity was fit for the client team to work with, too. “Brand identities should be a springboard for creative work, not a set of templates that restrict it,” says Fruzza.
This meant “stress testing over and over and ensuring that strategy, creative, design and client ambition are all working in tandem with the same clear visions and goals” over the course of a year and a half, according to Gordon.
The new identity will appear in Asda’s summer campaign, Serious About Summer, also created by Havas London. It features a series of ads directed by Pulse’s Freddie Waters that spotlight different family members at summertime, including a beach dad, a competitive mum, and a trampolining grandmother.
