00:00
This episode of a change of brand is brought to you by Brandpad, a new standard of brand guidelines. Brandpad is an online platform made by designers for designers. Keep listening for a special code just for you, our listeners. What is 31 flavors? What does that even mean? And there are, you know, certain people, certainly domestically, like if you, if you lived in Chicago, you wouldn't even say Basma Robbins, you would say, let's go to 31 flavors. So there was a big question in the beginning of.

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We're Baskin Robbins, this 31 flavors, mean anything.

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Hey everyone, welcome to A Change of Brand, a show featuring behind the scenes stories of rebrand, glory, drama, or disaster. I'm your host, Blake Howard.

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Growing up, I loved Little League Baseball for one reason. Post-game ice cream. Back then, there weren't a lot of ice cream shops to choose from, but luckily for me, there was a Baskin-Robbins in my little suburb on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. It was the unofficial gathering place for our West Park Baby Blue team. They had a seemingly endless amount of flavors and these tiny pink spoons to try all of them for free. It was good times.

01:23
Ice cream shops come with a fond nostalgia. I can walk into one today and the sights and the smells instantly transport me back to Little League. Today we get to talk about one of the largest and most iconic brands in the ice cream world, Baskin Robbins. Ice cream and cake and cake, ice cream and cake and cake, ice cream and cake, do the ice cream and cake, ice cream and cake.

01:49
With Baskin Robbins cakes, fun starts at only $9.99. It was founded in 1945 and became known for its famous 31 Flavors slogan. Today, the chain operates over 7,600 shops with 77,000 employees in nearly 50 countries, with annual sales of around $2.4 billion. With more than 1,500 flavors, that

02:15
constantly change, you can get anything from the top selling snickerdoodle chai to pink bubblegum. Since 1945, however, the competition has stacked up. There is a plethora of ice cream brands and styles to choose from. You have in-store experiences like Dairy Queen, Cold Stone Creamery, or Ginny's, and grocery store brands like Haagen-Dazs, Good Humor, Bluebell, and Ben & Jerry's. I don't want to say my favorite here because I don't want to start any fights.

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There's also a wave of local high quality or niche ice creams, some with oat milk, some with booze, and some still touting they're the ice cream of the future. Thank you, Dippin' Dots. When you throw in ice cream adjacent choices like soft serve, popsicles, Froyo, gelato, shaved ice, and more, you get some stiff competition for the consumer sweet tooth. With all that in mind in 2022, Baskin Robbins, the once creme de la creme of the category,

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felt the heat of their competition and their relevance melting away. For more backstory on the 2022 refresh and what led up to this change of brand, let's go to strategist Tracy Clark for our briefing.

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Ervin Robbins were brothers-in-law, but there was something even stronger binding them together. Their love of ice cream. Irv grew up managing the ice cream counter at his father's store. He saw that customers always seemed to be enjoying themselves, so it was hard not to finish a day's work happy. Irv wanted to capture that same feeling as he started his own ice cream parlor called Snowbird in Glendale, California. After Bert married into the family, Irv convinced him that selling ice cream was way more fun than his current job selling ones where.

04:09
After a couple of months of persuasion, he opened up Burton's Ice Cream. In 1948, they decided to merge their separate stores to create Baskin-Robbins. Being ice cream enthusiasts, both Bert and Irv wanted to offer more than the basic vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. So when they combined their menus, they ended up with 31 flavors. However, it wasn't until 1953 that this number became significant. Legendary ad agency Carson Roberts, which would later become part of Ogilvie,

04:37
suggested there was something special about the number 31, as it meant you could eat a different flavor of ice cream every day of the month. It has been a principle of the brand ever since. Baskin-Robbins' first logo proudly featured the number 31 in the middle of a minty green circle. With pink details and a circus-esque font, the logo aimed to be welcoming and joyful. After using this original brand mark for over 20 years, they simplified it in 1980.

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Using the same circus-y font and prominent number 31, the stripped back logo featured a palette of brown and the now signature bright pink. You might also recognize this color on those iconic pink sample spoons, which were introduced to allow customers to taste all the different flavors. Can you imagine not having the ability to try 10 different flavors before you end up picking the same one you always do? In 1991, the 31 was integrated much more naturally into the logo.

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with the number in the middle and Baskin & Robbins on either side. It was also the first time blue was introduced, replacing the brown. This blue and pink combo would serve as the color palette for the next 30 years. In 2006, the Baskin & Robbins logo got a complete makeover. The number 31 is cleverly disguised within the letters B and R, highlighted in pink with the rest of the logo in dark blue.

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It's regarded as one of the most famous hidden message logos delighting brand fans and in different consumers alike. In 2020, change was definitely the flavor of the times. Inspire brands acquired Baskin-Robbins as part of the $11.3 billion acquisition of Dunkin' Brands Group. Additionally, the global Baskin-Robbins brand logo got a slight tweak to include a darker shade of blue.

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Baskin-Robbins became a cultural staple as early as the 1960s when they released flavors like Beetle-Nut at the height of Beetlemania, Lunar Cheesecake in honor of the first moon landing, or even Gorba Chocolate honoring the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the fall of communism. Not only have they grown from 31 flavors to a catalog of over 1,400, Baskin-Robbins is now the largest chain of ice cream specialty stores in the world with over 8,000 locations.

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global market brand evolutions that were inconsistent with the US brand, along with, let's say, I don't know, a global pandemic, created brand confusion and fragmentation when they clearly needed to grow as a singular brand relevant across all of their markets. Baskin-Robbins was facing an even bigger challenge, audience relevancy. Changing consumer tastes were forcing even the most successful specialty food chains to adopt new strategies to keep growing.

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And let's face it, after being around for almost 80 years, there was a whole new generation growing up without Baskin-Robbins as a zenith of pop culture. They had no childhood connections to the ice cream shop of their parents and grandparents. Baskin-Robbins knew they needed to garner affinity and loyalty from the younger generation, a challenge for many of the nostalgic legacy brands still around today. Would a change of brand get folks all screaming for ice cream again? 31 Flavors to be specific.

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Keep listening to get the full scoop.

08:01
The 2022 redesign that we're discussing today harkens back to the original Baskin Robbins of 1947. Even the original chocolate and pink color have returned, with the brown ousting the previous navy blue. It's a tasty swirl of color and style that is slightly more modern, but still a clear nod to the past. The new type in the logo is a unique slab serif that helps give the mid-century vaudeville vibe.

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The clever blend of the BR turning into the 31 thankfully still remains. Now it's even a bit more integrated into the letters. And can we take a moment and give a hat tip to Jones, Knowles, Richie, or JKR who first integrated the 31 into the BR in 2006? Think about it. It was a major brand problem. Are we 31 flavors or Baskin Robbins? The hierarchy of the logo was confusing because

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The name was confusing. All the way back to the merger of the brothers business, it hasn't been very clear. To make matters worse, in some markets, the brand was 31 flavors, but in others it was Baskin Robbins. This is a rocky road of confusion. So JKR found a solution, where the previous logo just had an awkward blend of competing names reading Baskin 31 Robbins or 31 Baskin Robbins ice cream. This design clearly made the brand Baskin Robbins

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but kept the 31 cleverly hidden as a secondary message. Well done team. The new brand identity from 2012 that we're talking about today shines brightest in the mockups. You see advertising with delicious ice cream front and center and the unique type and color playing a supporting role. If you removed the Baskin Robbins logo from each ad, you'd still know it's probably Baskin Robbins.

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The new identity returns the brand to the good old days with an authentic look that is uniquely Baskin-Robbins. It's one of those identity systems that the more you think about it and look at it, the more you like it. Be sure to see the change of brand for yourself at AChangeOfBrand.com.

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One thing I was confused about, however, was another recent Baskin-Robbins brand refresh that debuted just a few months before this one in January of 2021. Baskin-Robbins launched a more evolutionary refresh designed by their old pals, Jones, Knowles, Richie, or JKR. What was wrong with that work? Why did they want to change again? So soon? Well, today we'll get the inside scoop. One of the really cool things is in design.

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if occasionally you get to work on brands that do have some kind of connection, especially childhood. And I have these memories of every Wednesday night was Boy Scout night. And my mom would take me and my brother, the four Boy Scouts to a picnic at the Salem Mall, which was the, the nation, if not the world's first food court. So anybody could get anything. It was like fast food, you know, Shangri-La and they had a Baskin Robbins. We'd always get a scoop of Baskin Robbins after everybody had whatever.

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dinner that they wanted and my mom would always tell us a story like we would forget when she was a little girl and obviously her parents went through the depression so they were very very conservative with money and treats and everything like that. She would get a scoop of ice cream regularly from the local Baskarops. It was like so special to her. So I remember all those stories and through her eyes and mine as well. That's Ryan Brazelton, Chief Creative Officer at ChangeUp.

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They were the firm tasked to restore Baskin-Robbins back to their glory days. I've always been a very like good basic ice cream guy, like into vanilla, like just can't go wrong. But as we got to do this project, um, and we dove into, uh, the archives and the flavors and what they stood for. I mean, now I'm going to have to go with the sort of OG icon that sort of helped unlock Baskin-Robbins to everyone, which was Pralines and cream.

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I did not think I would like it. It is incredible. And, um, that's the one I would pick. Wow. Okay. This could be like a new personality assessment. You could write a book on this, like your, what ice cream flavor do you choose? I feel like you learn, you learn a lot. So if you would have said vanilla, I'd be like, wow, Ryan, you play it safe. You know, like, right. I'm a risk taker, but, but what I just heard is that your life journey has been like you were playing it safe. And now.

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You go, you go for it, but you also value like the nostalgic classic flavor. So you desire meaning. See, I just learned so much about you. I don't even know what mine, mine would, would be. So it's, it's a tough question. After I revealed Ryan's deepest inner truths via the 31 flavors personality test, TM, he went on to say that changeup has worked a lot over the years with inspire brands.

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When Inspire acquired Dunkin' Brands in 2020, Ryan got the call to help out on this project. The mandate from Inspire was calling for some significant change for the Baskin-Robbins brand. Their aim was to grow the brand back to a leadership position domestically and internationally, which was a tall order. Luckily for Ryan and the team at ChangeUp, they were able to work with a tight-knit team on the client side.

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It was essentially the brand president and CMO on the Baskin Robbins side, with a few more from the Inspire executive leadership team. There were no frills, no steering committees, no sprinkles or gummy worms. It was just a high level, small group to tackle some big problems.

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There are quite a few problems actually when you start breaking it down. I mean, the two biggest, especially domestically, was the brand was very dated, very childish. When I say childish, I mean that certainly from a visual and branding point of view, but also just like it.

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it sort of lost its way. I mean, I remember when we looked and started digging into the brand currently coming to life and without a lack of a true design ethos, I mean, it was like they thrown every graphic trendy trope into the playbook to be like, this is what we can do. And I mean, it was just so we can do anything. It was really silly. And it looked like a brand domestically that was sort of geared to 13 year olds and then talk to like a brand that was like probably geared to 13 year olds.

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girls. And actually when you dig into who the customer was, it was a much more mature, you know, 30 plus year old, a little bit more masculine actually, but pretty split down to almost 50 50 split. So we need to grow the brand up. It was dated. And then domestically, you know, the brand itself from a from literally sort of a brand perception, it wasn't seen in the best light as a

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foundational as a brand and then internationally the brand was just killing it doing a really really great job but it was starting to lose out. I mean it's definitely in a leadership position in the international markets as it should be. Baskin-Robbins invented ice cream as we know it and the creativity of flavors is all all Baskin-Robbins and but they were starting to lose not only that authority but the quality perceptions weren't where they needed to be.

15:19
One of the questions I had going into my time with Ryan was trying to understand why Baskin-Robbins was refreshing the brand yet again, just months after the previous one. Well, it turns out Baskin-Robbins segments their domestic and international brands. The work that debuted in 2021 by JKR was the global business only, whereas domestically there were no changes. So that work was only for that market. So a lot of people don't realize in the United States, there was a very similar, but not quite the same logo.

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different colors, the pink and blue were different. So again, to a sophisticated eye, you're already a very disparate brand coming to life, not as confident as you should be. And then, you know, again, the brand, the visual identity of what came to life domestically was just all over the place and really frenetic. And what we needed to do was, number one, put a signature and certainly logo in place that was strong enough to be global.

16:17
And then second, certainly domestically, we needed to rebuild the brand at a core level. This could be a rabbit hole, but it's interesting that it was performing so well internationally, but then not domestically, even though Baskin-Robbins is an American company, you know, like you would think your home base would be where you perform and then as you scaled and the fringes of your scale, that's where it underperforms though, I don't know if you all discussed that at all, but I'm just curious off the cuff.

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It's so interesting. I mean, as you look across the world, you know, in a lot of different markets, I mean, US consumer brands, and a lot of times the QSR brands are just real darlings in internationally for various reasons. But I remember I was in Saudi Arabia once doing some work and saw a restaurant that we'd recently designed. And I was like, Oh, look at that. We did that. And then I said, Hey, what's the most popular restaurant here in KSA? And they said McDonald's.

17:14
Right. And it's kind of surprising. Some of you're all over the world, like, oh, maybe the world's a little bit smaller, but I think internationally there's some, there can be some celebrity with our brands that might not be here. Right. KFC is a big deal in the United States. Internationally KFC is a really big deal. Ryan and the change up team first wanted to understand why the Baskin-Robbins brand was struggling in the U S they took in all the research, did a brand audit, ate some ice cream and analyze what was working and what was not.

17:42
Based on those insights, they explored several creative territories and presented them to the Baskin-Robbins team. We did have this idea really early on, even as we started doing the stakeholder interviews and had this notion that there was some real rich DNA if we were to go back to the 50s, back to mid-century modern, looked a little bit back to that 50s time period when Baskin-Robbins was a category of one at the end of the day. We said, boy, we really think there's something there. And everyone said, yeah, there's something there. So.

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I know that was a route. There was a really fun, even more probably expressive and dynamic route around, if you can imagine a logo, identity built out of the quality of inclusions, ribbons, and things in the ice cream, and just one that was trying to be about really flavor. I remember there was a signature route, and the name's Baskin-Robbins, so how do we conjure the quality of that? There was, I think, one other route. And we liked them all for different reasons, but.

18:40
Definitely it was route one from the beginning in this case because I think not only did we have a ton of passion for it but the brand just said I remember after the The first presentation I remember the CMO Shannon at the time She just said it's got to be around because we're the only ones who could do this from You know from the logo to the colors to the other ways in to the toolkit really

19:06
And so that was exciting. I mean, that's what you want to hear from a client is words like that. After that presentation, Ryan and the ChangeUp team were riding the sugar high and started to work out the important design nuances and details for the chosen idea until it became what we see in the world today.

19:25
All right, time for a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna drizzle some drama on this sweet rebrand story as the team gets ready for launch. All that and more after the break. Hey, while we're taking this break, I wanna give a huge shout out to Brandpad for sponsoring this episode. I love using Brandpad here at Matchstick where I work. Gone are the days of static and dusty brand guidelines.

19:51
Made by designers for designers, Brandpad is easy to use and allows us and our clients to make updates instantly. Because it's become our go-to platform for creating beautiful digital guidelines for clients, our friends at Brandpad have given us a code to share with you in hopes that it helps you too. Use code CHANGE15 for 15% off of your next subscription. For more information, check out brandpad.io. That's brandpad.

20:20
Hey, listeners, did you know Blake, our fearless podcast host and dad joke expert, has written a book? What? Yeah, it's totally true. It covers a range of brand identity topics and solutions to help CMOs and other brand leaders uncover a more radically relevant brand. In fact, that's the name, radically relevant. And since we all love to take quizzes, it comes with an assessment too, so you can see how your brand stacks up against the competition.

20:46
For more on the book or to take the free radically relevant assessment, check out radically relevant brand.com. And if you're enjoying the show, don't forget to join the conversation on Instagram. See more about today's episode, share with a friend, or send us an idea you have for a future episode at a change of brand. All right, let's get back to it.

21:08
Just before the break, the change-up team was seeing the gold at the end of the rainbow sherbet, with a core concept approved by the client. Next up, they started to get into super nerdy things like a color system for the brand's 1500 flavors. But one of the things we ran into really quick was Basked Robbins has over, you know, 1500 flavors of ice cream. And I feel like, you know, 1200 of them involve chocolate or some kind of chocolate ice cream.

21:37
So think about in a world where we've got to do flavor strips and you might have hundreds of ice cream that at the end of the day are some kind of different chocolate, but like look the same. So how are we going to solve that? And I remember in some of the earlier work I'd seen I saw like a secondary color palette and I kid you not I must've seen, it must've been like 120 various hues and Pantone colors and then various tones. Like, boy, these are the approved colors.

22:04
Are you telling me that that hundred colors is how we're gonna communicate? And those are the, that's the right brown for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of various chocolates we have. But for the ice cream flavors, we created little mini palettes. And what we proved out, and this was a huge effort, was that we could actually create a palette of colors for every single ice cream. And we could do it by answering one of three questions. Number one, what's the ice cream look like? Duh. So if the ice cream has a unique visual profile,

22:34
Maybe we can mimic that with the branding, but maybe we can't back to chocolate. So then what's the next thing is, well, what's it taste like if it has a really interesting taste profile that's demonstrably different than the other chocolate? Like, how do we tell that story through color? And when we get locked out there, then there's the naming strategy. And can we evoke the flavor through the name and what kind of colors can deliver on the name? But basically.

23:03
By answering one of those three questions, we create the color strategy for all the flavors. So it wasn't about, you know, these are the right 200 colors. That's a silly exercise, give me a break. Let's just have ice cream that is just super, super gorgeous, real, no tricks, but sort of, how do we photograph the ice cream in a new major way? And just let it do kind of all the work. Domestically, they had a very...

23:31
Every ice cream scoop looked like a scoop of Play-Doh. It was all very homogenized and all look the same. Just the color might change a little bit. And there was this old fashioned skirt around it, I think they called it. And we literally have an architecture for scoops. Now, like a whole new language, there's the scoop itself. And recognizing that different types of ice creams have different textures, and it should. So texture's not bad. Recognizing we want...

23:59
a scoop that to achieve a certain amount of circularness that like harkens back to the identity itself and the counters and the B and we wanted that. But then we never wanted to see that just like play doughy skirt around it. So we started creating like a CAD plan of what the approach to the new ice cream is. And it was all about look, we live in Instagram world, we need, we need you to be scrolling and have ice cream just like make you hungry.

24:29
But it also was a huge task because they have, you know, over 1,500 flavors that need to be reshot. A large part of this refresh was to update the messaging and pivot the tone of voice for the brand. Previously, it was just a bit scattered and lacked focus. Additionally, there was a pesky little 31 flavors phrase to deal with. The team was curious, is that even relevant anymore? Like the Clash 1982 rock hit, should it stay or should it go now?

24:57
Certainly all the parlors and ice cream shops, there was definitely like this eat, pray, love kind of vibe. Like it was super sweet and young and, you know, very female. And the new tone of voice is a lot more grown up. You know, the opposite of that. Oh, that was the other thing right along with that was the whole 31 flavors. So there was a huge brand question when you really looked hard at the brand with the 31. And I can't believe I didn't talk about this.

25:27
What is 31 flavors? What does that even mean? And there are certain people, certainly domestically, like if you lived in Chicago, you wouldn't even say Baskin-Robbins. You would say, let's go to 31 flavors. So there was a big question in the beginning of, were Baskin-Robbins, does 31 flavors mean anything? Originally, the idea was back in the 50s, that there were 31 flavors and that you could have a different scoop of ice cream.

25:57
every day of the month. That was what you could have. But today there's not an ice cream parlor, I don't think on the planet that has 31 flavors. And they don't have 31 flavors. They have 1500 flavors and it changes all the time. And there's a new one every month. And your ice cream probably might have eight, it might have 12, it might have 16, but definitely doesn't have 31. What does 31 mean? So we tell the story now of what 31 flavors meant to the brand. And it is the legend.

26:25
31 flavors, right? It's a seal. It's a whole manifesto. It ends with long live ice cream. And then that became a way to start to say, this is how we're going to speak. We're going to be the absolute champions of ice cream and creativity and flavor. We invented it. No one can take that away from us. We continue to do that. And then I remember as we were working on the tone of voice one day, one of our strategists was we were working on a naming protocol.

26:54
how to come up with names, future names for the brand was kind of a side project. Cause there had been no rigor around that. They'd just get into a room and everyone would just start tossing their names into a hat. So we were coming up with a more disciplined and strategic approach to naming. And I remember one day as I popped into their office and on their screen, as I looked at this pyramid of attributes to build into the naming.

27:23
process was just the words smile fuel. That's it. And now smile fuel is on every single cup, Bass and Robbins, like in the whole wide world and not being like worried about, oh, it's the world fuel. You can't say fuel. It's people are going to think of oil companies and it's like, no, stop, stop, stop, stop with that and just be, you know, much more real and cool and of today. So far this change story is churning out success left and right.

27:53
Small project team, check. Clear decision-making, check. Exciting new work, check. So rich and creamy smooth. Until it wasn't.

28:05
Just as the domestic version of the rebrand was about to launch, one of the main leaders on the client side dropped a bomb pop on the team. She was leaving Baskin Robbins. This is one of those projects where we had a CMO switch out right before the brand launched. And I can't tell you how much, how many projects that I've worked on that we're about to launch and the 11th hour, there's an executive change. And that can often mean the.

28:35
whole death of changed and it doesn't matter what we're what amazing great work that you've done that was about to see the light of day that's always a huge scary moment navigating that moment of transition in this case you know it went really really smooth from one CMO together so that was like really great and I guess the takeaway I I'm a huge believer in executive stakeholders being involved

29:02
in the process, like in a pretty significant way throughout, not only in that sort of discovery phase of listening to them and understanding them, but through the process, it just makes it, you know, the brands I find where the top level C-suite are not engaged because they're too busy doing their day job and big rebranding efforts or...

29:27
you know, big design projects are sort of relegated into some other department and will eventually be seen for a sign-off. You know, are so much more exposed and might not get the opportunity to come to life the way it can. So this one didn't have that from the brand president. All the way up to Inspire, Paul Brown being really close to the brain transformation work helped make it as smooth as it can be for a project like this. I do feel like most of the drama in these stories comes when...

29:55
There's just a ceiling between stakeholders engaged in the work in the C-suite. Because they will ultimately sign off if the change is somewhat significant. But if they're not in the process understanding decisions made along the way, the end result, they might really disagree with. Because they don't understand all of those decisions that went into it. Or even though they're at that level for a large organization, they still might not know how to think about it the right way.

30:25
So all of those, those meetings and those conversations have, have formed on the smaller project team level, uh, agreement on how are we going to think about this and so to have an outsider then swoop in who's also the decision maker, it's like, you know, that's usually where the drama comes in. And, and a lot of projects do die at that point, especially at an organization at this size, because it's a big investment, but it's also not like their entire marketing budget. So if, if it goes away.

30:54
It's like, oops, that didn't go well, but it's not a, this is gonna really just disrupt the business as usual. With smaller organizations, you know, there's a lot more skin in the game because they waste that level of investment. It's painful. So they're motivated to approve. I so agree. And the other thing I find too, is when you have that ceiling to executive and C-suite and you can't get to them so often, I find this, there can be this culture that some organizations have. Well, we know what so-and-so.

31:23
likes, doesn't like, so you get all this like third-hand, second-hand, some institutional knowledge which may or may not be real. Sometimes it's real and sometimes it's a myth around a person's taste, one's beliefs, but the other thing that's amazing when you do have at the end of the day the absolute last word of the project is involved from the beginning. Not only do they get to come along for the story and sort of be part of the building of it, but I've been impressed with how often a lot of them.

31:51
equities that might be precious or sacred to the brand, that that could be bad equity. Like, yes, we've always done it like that, but we shouldn't like that. That's bad equity, but we've always done it. And so often if you can just get that access to be in the right room with the right person, they'll go, yeah, that's silly. And they'll just stop doing it. With the leadership transition scare out of the way, Ryan and the team at ChangeUp were feeling pretty good about the domestic launch.

32:20
He was nervous, of course, but more so excited for the world to see all of his hard work. In April of 2022, the new logo debuted, and the rebrand made headlines. Industry critics and mainstream media covered the change and shared their opinions on the new color, new type choices, and the overall vibe. In conjunction with the rebrand, an investment to upgrade US and Canada stores was also announced. Additionally, they launched the new logo and visual identity on social media.

32:48
A few days into the launch campaign, they showcased a new line of merch for brand fans and even sent free gifts like socks or shirts, etc. out to anyone who commented. It was a smooth move. Not to sugarcoat it too much, like always, the new design was met with some criticism. Some people didn't like the typeface selections or some of the messaging in general, but you know, most reactions to brand changes are based on subjective tastes. The majority of people aren't analyzing the strategy or

33:17
understanding the business case for change. They think of it more of like ice cream flavors. Some people love mint chocolate chip like my wife and others. And some of us think those people are crazy. So there, I said it. You know how I feel. I am not on team mint chocolate chip. Anyway, you get the point. The new identity unified the global Baskin Robbins brand and it did it in a unique way. So job well done.

33:45
I think brand identities don't ruffle some feathers, probably didn't go very hard. Uh, so let me say that I love when people love it and hate it. That means, uh, that means for a whole bunch of people, you're doing something right. I think broadly publicly went really well to your point. Sure. I I'd say in the design branding community, there was the typical dialogue. I think you can expect by approaching any of these beloved iconic brands and, you know, not everyone knows all the, the whys and the reasons behind, uh,

34:14
Decisions made and that's okay over the years. I take most of it with a smile and a wink and you know I think at the end of the day our community is a pretty small niche very important though super important community, but Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, it's it's you know It is about the business results the brand and what did we really do for them? For the most part it was all cherries Jubilee for change-up and the Baskin-Robbins team after the domestic launch

34:41
So successful in fact, Inspire Brands was ready to roll out the new logo across the globe. For the first time in many, many years, Baskin-Robbins will have one global badge, but we needed to create a visual identity that would deliver against what they needed internationally. So that was the second big bucket of work for them as well. And the difference being Baskin-Robbins internationally is strong, very, very strong brand, the clear leader in the category. But, you know, some of the other competitors are making more inroads than...

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than they would like. So part of it was to push the accessible premiumness up a little bit, the quality procession needed to come up further, but it definitely needed to still be flavor first. So internationally, the brand's in a good spot. Yes, we have a new badge and yes, we need to do that. But it wasn't like as from a brand level's foundational what needed to happen domestically of who we are and what we stand for and why.

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should care internationally. It was like, we know you love us. It's all about these flavors. So how do we do flavors in a new world? And so there was a different approach to sort of color. We go into these color worlds, these beautiful gradients that are moving and motion's built in and it's all those colors. So again, we almost ramped up that whole color theory I was talking about earlier where it is all the colors coming to life when you're in a flavor world. It's all about that flavor. So color is the brand almost.

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The international work wrapped up about four months later and it was the icing on the cake. I was personally happy to see how much it stayed connected to the domestic brand. A pet peeve of mine is fragmenting an identity into multiple sets based on different audiences or markets. You often can cannibalize the overall equity or just create more work for yourself. It's like we say in the American South, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

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Okay, it's time to skip dinner and get straight to the pint. I was glad that Ryan cleared up the confusion behind multiple refreshes for the Baskin Robbins brand in the last few years. I also appreciate some of the design choices, owning the light blue and pink, the slab serif type, and especially keeping the 31 hidden in the mark. I also liked the return to the circus era vibe when ice cream was basking in its glory days. It just feels right for the brand.

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My only criticism is how the new logo doesn't work as well in one color as it previously did. It loses the hidden 31 and creates an odd looking R. But that's pretty nitpicky. One key ingredient to this smooth project was the C-suite. Get it? They were engaged and helped break institutional stigmas that might have otherwise hindered or slowed down change-up in their progress. Also,

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you didn't have franchise focus groups, consumer testing, or other processes that aren't bad, but often can spoil the best of ideas.

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I don't want to say a once in a lifetime project, but it's one of those projects that to get to work on a heritage, like a legendary brand at a pivotal time point when it's going to be a really important and big evolution, who doesn't want to work on those? So for me, it was one of those. To wrap up this tasty change story, here are my adorable kids with their favorite ice cream jokes. Know why? Man, ice cream is good at poker.

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because it has so many chips.

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Hey Dad, you know what's Deer's favorite ice cream flavor? Cookie dough!

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Why did the ice cream truck blow a tire? It was driving down the rocky road.

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You know why I got out of the ice cream business? I just didn't like working on Sundays.

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Why do ice cream cones always carry an umbrella? In case there's a chance, there's sprinkles!

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How does Reese eat her ice cream? With her spoon. Why is ice cream so bad at tennis? They have a soft serve.

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What happens when ice cream gets angry? It has a meltdown. Hey!

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Ok that's a wrap. Special thanks to Ryan Brazelton and the team at Change Up for giving us their take on the change. To see more visuals from today's episode head on over to a changeofbrand.com and if you liked today's show share it with a friend or leave us a review on apple podcasts. Today's episode was edited and scored by Landon Osatutu.

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Fact Checked by Jill Jeffries, written in part and produced by Brianna Belcher. Special thanks to Tracy Clark for the brief end and Rachel Jackson for today's artwork. I'm your host, Blake, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Howard, signing off.