MasterZoo is a Ukrainian brand leader in the zoo retail category. For more than 15 years, the company has been bringing new trendy products to the market, changing the idea of what the pet shopping experience can be. The brand has the same big ambitions for the future, so in addition to innovation in zoo care, the team also wanted to say a new word in communication and design. Together with the Taktika agency, the brand restyled its identity, presented a new brand strategy and a large advertising campaign.
The agency team organized in-depth interviews with people to find insights. In what the respondents told about their favorites, they found one common and very cool find, which formed the basis of the future brand strategy. It turned out that most people personify their pets, explain their behavior with human emotions and causal relationships. Each dog, cat or parrot is a person with its own personality, which differs from all other dogs, cats and parrots in the world.
Taktika and the MasterZoo team saw an interesting truth in this and wanted to support people in this perception. MasterZoo is convinced that pets will live happier lives if their humans treat them as individuals. MasterZoo’s new brand strategy in one sentence: “MasterZoo believes that every pet is an individual with its own personality, preferences and characteristics.”
The brand will talk about pets not just as animals or an object of care, but as individuals, real members of families, intelligent individuals. To introduce people to the new positioning, Taktika created MasterZoo’s first major campaign. In it, they did the same thing as in in-depth interviews — they let people talk about their furry personalities. Only in advertising, what the human imagination draws in its head, was drawn on the screens.
Along with a major brand update in communication, the design has also been updated. The MasterZoo logo was restyled so that the brand did not lose its recognition and did not have to change the signboard and branding again in hundreds of stores throughout Ukraine. In the sign, the thicknesses were compared and one pin was made in the text part, reworking it. This allows the logo to work better at small sizes and be more readable on layouts.
The brand’s new identity is largely based on corporate typography. The main font of MasterZooSans was developed specially for the new identity by font designer Maksym Kobuzan.
For MasterZoo, we found a corporate style of illustrations. They are made with a black marker and specially look a little naive, as if they were not made by a professional illustrator, but simply by a person by hand. All of them are slightly different in character, but in the same style. This allows the various designers and illustrators who work with the brand to easily and quickly create a bunch of new drawings. Thanks to their linearity, they are also easy and convenient to place on layouts.
“For us, a pet is not about a living object for which its owners have taken responsibility. For us, a pet is a personality. Everyone has their own habits, whims, hobbies and preferences. For us, the updated brand strategy has become like an injection of youth. And the best estimate is millions of views and tens of thousands of comments, in which our subscribers and customers share the stories of their furry, tailed, moustached or scaly personalities”, said Oleksiy Koksharov, Marketing Director of MasterZoo.
