Leading the way to gut health with a bold brand identity

About The Entry

M&S Food saw the ZOE Gut Shot as a category-defining product, leading its ambition to become a go-to retailer for health needs. Whippet were tasked with creating a visual identity and brand comms to launch the product in-store, appealing to health-conscious customers at a crucial time of year.

To engage this audience, our comms spotlighted the authority of ZOE's nutritional scientists and co-Founder Professor Tim Spector. We featured Tim’s face prominently in our designs for window visuals, shelf POS and social media content, emphasising his expertise.

We used the bottle shape as a micro pattern throughout our designs, rendering an exuberant splash of the drink itself to highlight what’s in the bottle. The resulting identity evoked the quality and taste of the product while giving our POS an explosive energy.

Tone of voice played a key role in navigation. Hanging posters invited curiosity with the statement, “This way to good gut health”, alongside others that repeated our key line, “Is this the world’s greatest gut shot?”. Signage played on the bottle’s distinct shape to help build brand recognition, supported by social media and press ads in the weeks leading up to launch.

In stores, large cut-out bottles guided customers from the entrance to the shelves. These championed the flavour and excitement of the product by using our key assets: the bottle outline, energising yellow, and a playful splash of fruit. With its blend of bold product imagery, rich colour and empowering tone of voice, our identity turned the launch of the M&S Food x ZOE Gut Shot into a major event both in store and online.

Our creative strategy introduced customers to this innovative product, channelling everything that makes it special. Upon launch, the Gut Shot became a huge success story for M&S Food: the retailer now sells more gut shots than Coke and water.

- 75% more Gut Shots have been sold than forecasted pre-launch.

- The M&S Food x ZOE gut shot was the biggest Food on the Move volume line, outselling the benchmark rate of sale lines by over 300%.