Case Study: Brand Re-Imagining at Panera
The 90-Day Voice Project
What defines the voice of Panera Bread? The brand was incredibly successful. But when their longtime CEO stepped down, they lost their distinct voice and personality. To help reveal the true soul of Panera they enlisted big thinkers to uncover insights into the existing voice, convert those impressions into design principles and behaviors and inspire fresh actions and ideas. To bring the work to life, a core team distilled and enriched the work from each session into an evolving brand exhibit that served as a jump off point for the next session and an overview of the work for the senior leadership team.
SESSION 1: Uncover Insights
Eleven experts in fields unrelated to restaurants, branding or marketing gathered to analyze the existing voice and interpret the findings. Panera is already beloved by its loyal customers. So they examined the best examples of the company’s work to uncover the voice they were confident already lay beneath.
SESSION 2: Establish Design Principles & Behaviors
More than 10 designers worked to convert the deep insights uncovered from Session 1 into design principles and behaviors. These principles serve to guide the creative works that express Panera’s newly uncovered voice.
SESSION 3: Inspire Fresh Actions & Ideas
A mix of creatives from inside and outside Panera formed cross-functional teams to solve business and brand challenges that asked: How could Panera talk and behave if it didn’t focus solely on clean food–an approach so many competitors have now adopted? The resulting briefs introduced fresh thinking on the brand, how they lead and where they are going.
The Cocoon
The newly hired VP of Design & Concepts, Scott Mitchum, and VP of Design & Experience, Teran Evans, spearheaded the project. They built out a temporary workspace in the center of sister brand Au Bon Pain's headquarters in Boston's Seaport. It was purposefully utilitarian, slightly rough, and textural–meant to feel like a workshop not a refined workspace or staid cubicle driven office. The space was lovingly coined "The Cocoon". They brought a core team of designers, copywriters, project management and various Panera teams to the Cocoon to help articulate, visualize and evolve the work. This is where the magic would happen.
The Cocoon
The Cocoon served not only as the workshop space but also as the backdrop for the presentation of work. As visual design lead, I worked with Scott and Teran to establish a look and feel for the materials and a design system for key visuals. The materials would play off the texture and craft nature of the currogated cardboard walls with thin low tack masking tape used to create working spaces, silver t-pins for collage of work and ideas, sticky notes and sharpies for handwritten notes, and more refined graphic wayfinding and big statements printed on the inhouse plotter. The result was a textural, temporary, work in progress space–unfinished, able to be easily adjusted, and crafted. It was a workshop of evolving brand ideas to be presented to senior leadership and key teams throughout the company. The result was approachable, thoughtful but not completed work, a discussion of big new ideas crafted by external and internal leaders, not a directive of swift change from a new design team.
Evolving The Work
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