This case study is an attempt to analyze the development of brand design in Russia through the history of the oldest and largest sausage brand, Tsaritsyno. The mistakes made by the brand during the many years of the search for a visual language of its own still greatly impact the way Russian ‘sausage design’ looks and behaves. Rather sad up to this moment, nowadays it is changing fast, analyzing its failures and shedding redundant heraldic imagery, the design heritage of the Soviet and post-Soviet times.

In 2013, Tsaritsyno company realized that its design heritage is preventing it from expanding on the market and ventured on an unprecedented redesign: a challenge for a company operating in the whole of Russia. At this stage they asked us to conduct a competition to develop its new identity among our readers, young designers.

The series of research materials in this application is the result of our desire to help the designers better understand the brand’s context and stimulate their loyalty to the task. For thousands of young creators Tsaritsyno was just another boring story. We wanted to change that.

We were confident that a well-written, detailed, emotional, and fascinating story would help the design community take a fresh look at the industry not with irony or vexation, but with a desire to act, analyze and change its visual language. Our materials excited great interest in our readers, but the main result appeared to stun even us. Within the past six months, a whole number of large Russian meat processing factories undertook radical redesigning projects and many of them are now quite able to compete with Western brands.

Having launched the competition and provided designers with all necessary data (brief, models, credits, references, mood boards), we went to interview the enthusiastic team at Tsaritsyno company. Together we searched the archives, found the earliest weak ideas of the company’s style, its first advertising attempts. We never forgot of the context where Tsaritsyno’s identity had been shaped, both in terms of economy and technology: the jolly 1970s, the first suitable packaging solutions, the tense 1980s, the rethinking of the role of packaging in economy, the Perestroika and the consumption boom – all this served as background for our story, together with the inspiring slides.

During long consultations with the experts, we formulated the main ‘alarming symptoms’ of sausage design in Russia and found the reasons for dubious design solutions. The consultations resulted in a presentation that we published after our review: http://wtpack.ru/Presentation.pdf

Within only one week since the publication of these materials, we receive a great many responses even from the part of our audience we considered hopeless. The readers’ responses showed that this research, unique for the Russian design journalism, became something of a trigger for designers, marketing specialists and brand managers.

One of the main goals of the ‘What the pack?’ project is to bring the Cyrillic brand design to the Western level of quality. We believe that only an analytical approach to each task is able to move the Russian designer teams forward. The basis of a strong brand is a well-executed, meticulous and fact-checked design research.