During my secondment at Zeal, I had the opportunity to work on an exciting proposed collaboration between KitKat and Mind. The goal was to position KitKat as a brand that champions the importance of mental health and well-being in a creative and engaging way. My task was to design a promotional pack for the 4-finger KitKat and create a supporting poster visual to showcase the partnership and the pack design.
Upon researching existing collaborations between HFSS brands and charities, I found many to be superficial and lacking true empathy and understanding. To address this, I took a darker tone and developed visuals that used clever visual metaphors and product placement to depict the effects of declining mental health. The promotional materials featured a stripped-back design, removing the frills and decorations seen in KitKat's regular branding and its competitors' branding. Instead, it focused on logos, text, and powerful background imagery, with taglines posing questions related to various mental health struggles. The proposed on-pack solution followed a similar streamlined approach, transforming KitKat's solid red background into a red-to-black gradient and featuring the tagline "Are you at breaking point?" along with Mind's website and logo for individuals seeking support.
Maintaining simplicity and seriousness, the on-pack promotional artwork eliminated decoration and the image of the KitKat itself, opting for a stark two-toned gradient. The use of black in the design aligned with the poster visuals and allowed them to take centre stage in the campaign.
In exploring innovative out-of-home advertising channels for this project, I created mock-ups of two pseudo-3D billboards that utilised perspective to generate striking 3D imagery consistent with the visual theme developed for the posters.
Although this proposed collaboration never progressed beyond the ideation stage, I am incredibly proud of the project. It challenged the typical approach to mental health awareness campaigns. When one thinks about visuals that talk about mental health, your mind typically goes straight to illustrated visuals of emoji- like creatures having a bad day and perhaps being given a cup of tea and a hug. Whilst it’s great to raise awareness to issues surrounding mental health, sugar-coating and trivialising it can almost do as much damage as doing nothing at all. What if we took a different approach? My solution is darker, grittier and direct. This campaign features a variety of images showing a KitKat positioned in life- threatening, isolating or damaging positions - really leaning on the word ‘break’. The aim was to make viewers pause and reflect on the serious nature of mental health issues, initiating deeper conversations and understanding.
