South Africa's most innovative airline, kulula.com teamed up with The Brand Union to restructure and refresh its brand.
Now in its seventh year in SA's skies, kulula is best known for affordable air travel, quirky ads and friendly, refreshing service, redefining South Africans' travel experiences everywhere. With new opportunities on the horizon, we came on board to review brand strategy and design in support of kulula's exciting new portfolio possibilities. The brand is now stretching into other areas of business namely: holiday packages, mobile phone and internet packages as well already playing in the financial services arena with their credit card.
Strong personality, simple logo
“kulula is a brand with a strong personality; it may be described as fun, quirky, optimistic and a little anti-establishment. The brand is very much loved among the South African public. As the brand stretches into new avenues of business, it has been most important in the re-branding exercise to not destroy any of the good equity that already resides in the brand” says Creative Director, Bronwen Rautenbach.
The new logo needed to celebrate all the good things about kulula. For this reason the solution is typographic which is also in-line with simple value, it's about making a strong statement without all the unnecessary bells and whistles.
The solution stays with the characteristically bold typography, as this is quite distinctive, not to mention appropriate, this brand is not shy! The word mark has been crafted to be a lot more legible. A 10 degree “angle of take-off” rotation infuses it with a sense of optimism.
We wanted to play with the rhythm inherent in the name. Alternating greens on every second letter bring in an element of fun in a simple way. It is fortunate that kulula is a six-letter word with three syllables and each syllable ends in a vowel.
More brands join the kulula family
This idea of alternating colour successfully informed the solution for the sub brands as each one takes on its own distinctive bright colour along with the characteristic kulula green. So strong family ties, using colour as an infuser of individual personality.
The alternatively coloured letters become exclusive real estate for the sub brand at hand and may be creatively used as a campaignable element. They may be dipped in bling, encrusted in diamonds, infused with the spirit of the latest ad campaign, the opportunities are endless.
Bright ideas beautifully crafted Says CEO Anthony Swart, “kulula's an iconic South African brand which has a youthful, independent and somewhat irreverent culture. Repositioning the kulula brand to retain this differentiated value set into new markets and sectors was a challenge eagerly taken up by The Brand Union.”
Visit our PRESS OFFICE: The Brand Union is a world-class global brand agency, comprising 500 people across 21 offices. What binds us together is a deep-seated commitment to becoming masters of the art and science of brand building. The Brand Union, South Africa, has a 30-year history, having worked with many of South Africa's best brands. Our core services include Research, Strategy, Design, Engagement and Evaluation.- more....