The evolution of the Eveready Battery Brand
Date : 19 June 2014
The Eveready brand was established in 1937, and has been a dominate FMCG brand, proudly flying the South African flag ever since.
Eveready has had such a presence in the zinc chloride market that the business feared to change the house icon in any way. In the 90s Eveready launched a successful alkaline product using the house icon. But with the opening of the new South Africa to international brands, and Eveready being acquired by Duracell in 1996, Eveready ceased to compete with an alkaline product.
Fast forwarding to 2003, Eveready became independently owned, detaching itself from Duracell and immediately launched and established an alkaline product. The re-launched Eveready alkaline retained the traditional brand icon, the house.
Unable to move beyond the market share it had captured, Eveready began to question whether the traditional house icon had a limited appeal to the upper LSMs of the alkaline market. Its rejuvenation goal was to correctly position the brand as a modern and technically innovative one.
This resulted in a significant shift in thinking.
While at a technical level the products are competitive, Eveready needed to compete from a visual and packaging perspective. Though the company has a compact brand management team, it is seen this as one of its core competencies. Through a process of market research and intimate consumer focus groups Eveready discovered a need for a significant departure from its 70 year old heritage.
In 2011 it launched the Eveready Platinum, Platinum Plus and Lithium lines. Key features of these products were a departure from using alkaline as the product descriptor as it had little meaning to the consumer and using colour, texture and shape to communicate the modern and technological innovation of the brand. Significant to the company, was a move away from the house to our new corporate logo.
Wary of the danger of changing a well-entrenched iconic logo, Eveready has retained the house element in the lower LSM products such as Power Plus Silver and Power Plus Gold and the layer cell.
Since the re-launch Eveready consumer awareness and acceptance of the Platinum range as well as market share has improved. The refreshed Eveready logo has slowly transferred into its corporate image, communication platforms and identity, and has brought with it the technological and innovative identity we had wanted to achieve.
