Moving into institutional catering offered Ovation Catering the opportunity to create their first retail brand.
With a younger audience in an educational setting and a significant percentage of females, we were communicating to a demographic that was markedly different from Ovation’s typical workforce accommodations/catering clientele.
The brand needed to align with language from the supermarket/restaurant/café world. Young, fresh, modern were good words to describe the feeling we wished to create.
The act of eating should be an enjoyable one, regardless of whether you’re sitting down for a proper meal or eating a sandwich while studying.
Terms we avoided were “grab’n’go” and “quick-e food” because of their association with convenience store cheap brands. Ovation’s food was freshly prepared, so while they were offering convenience it was in a different space than the items you find in the gas station’s refrigerators. If we had used this language, we would have connected to the cheap food people eat as a last resort and never feel good about doing it.
So we chose simple words like dish, bite, and fresh fare to evoke the emotional feeling of a café. Going one step further, gnosh was an older word meaning to snack, nibble or eat between meals.
Regardless of whether the audience knew what the word meant initially, they would see the design cues in the label that say modern lifestyle. It could make them curious, and being curious meant they were engaging with the brand on more than a superficial level. We hoped a good eating experience would reward that curiosity and lead to additional sales.
