Overview
As the world faces the consequences of the environmental degradion on their personal health, people are now consciously choosing more sustainable habits to power through endless work calls and social obligation. Getting to know the side effects of chemical fertilizers and insecticides on soil and personal health, a niche for people finding healthy and sustainable substitutes to eating has risen.
Seeing the growing demand for organic products, food companies have begun to offer naturally grown foodgrains and processed foods. As the segment shows great growth potential, many startups offering organic food alternatives have sprouted in India.
Still, with the rise in the organic food industry, it becomes vital that the cause behind such an initiative is not lost in translation. This has become a significant cause of concern for most new startups in this industry: improper branding and failure to reach the right audience through new marketing alternatives, vis-à-vis social media management.
Social Media has emerged as a distinguished medium for brand promotion. First of all, it is open to all; secondly, it gives businesses a chance to follow their consumers’ activities; and lastly, it helps you reach out to potential buyers.
Hence, a good social media presence is better than spending all of your advertising budget on outdoor publicity.
About Virtuous Organic
Focused on a chemical-free, self-sustaining, and coherent ecology for healthy living, Virtuous Organics positions itself as an organic food startup. Major Chhavi Sharma (Retd), who has 12 years of supply-chain management expertise in the Indian Army Service Corps, launched Virtuous Organic.
Their business model directly affects the livelihood of the farmers who have been working in line with policies released by the state and national government. Hence, With a vision of a healthy India where organic food is widely available and affordable to people from all walks of life, the brand encourages farmers to embrace sustainable techniques that produce healthier products.
Project
Virtuous Organic is a brand that brings organic India staples to your platter while supporting farmers practising organic farming. It not only promotes a healthy and sustainable lifestyle but is also helping farmers to enjoy a sustainable income.
A brand-new brand with such a noble cause required its social media presence to be felt, primarily to create brand awareness. But before that, it also needed brand identity essentials. So our area of action with regards to this project involved designing its logos, product packaging, and stationery kits.
Firstly, the Virtuous Organic logo was created in earthy tones such as brown, green, and yellow, in line with the company’s name and nature. In addition, we placed a human caricature that reached upwards in the centre, demonstrating how getting organic leads towards the correct way and living a better life.
As our client is a homegrown brand which helps out Indian farmers, its packaging had to have an indie flavour. Therefore, we went for a mandala design that resembles a rangoli. A rangoli in India denotes welcoming prosperity to our homes. And of course, the packaging was done in a recyclable paper. We also designed stationery kits which included envelopes, letterheads, and business cards.
While working on its social media, our primary goal is to make aware people of using organic products and promoting the brand’s products through this platform. As a newly found brand, we maintain the elements of the brand, such as colours and fonts in our posts, to establish the brand and create a photogenic memory of it in the consumer’s mind. Moreover, while designing the creatives for the brand, we focus on using colourful picture that replicate a typical Indian platter.
This way we have been able to introduce our nutritious products on social media.
Challenges
Every startup branding project comes with a certain level of complexity. In this project, it came with a package. While an aesthetic brand packaging intrigues and attracts customers and limits the possibility of them dismissing it. Moreover, it reinforces your brand identity by informing customers about the motive of launching such a product.
So, it took a few trials and errors to arrive at perfection; the packaging took many rounds of changes even after being placed on the stands.
Besides this, establishing a newly-found startup is a complex job. While deriving the brand identity as per its objectives is of utmost importance, it also requires thorough research and clarity to design the right elements.
Therefore a perfect understanding of the brand helps you reach your target audience and increase your customer base.
Opportunities
The project added a new feather to our hat; Decode has been fortunate to work with brands with unique and novel ideas. After a safe launch, the company must build momentum to reach breakeven. Decode got an opportunity to prepare a company for its launch on social media.
Additionally, we became a part of its business development. We developed and designed content for pitching presentations to clients, for which we received a lot of appreciation. Our compatibility smoothened the coordination, and we could entirely focus on our deliverables.
It has resulted in a flourishing association with the brand. The brand still approaches us for consultancy in terms of marketing. Such ease of communication also helps us develop their social media strategies and handle their day-to-day social media pages.
Impact
Virtuous Organics successfully made a market debut with a wide range of organic products, a firm business objective and a sustainable business model. The company is slowly and gradually picking up in market space. We have been able create brand awareness regarding the products with different marketing tools yields good results in terms of sales.
With this, the company has been able to work on its business model and offer good incentives to farmers while still being in its infant stage. Once achieving a pre-set target, the company plans to go pan India through its dynamic marketing strategies.
