Agatha Christie
Finding the true appeal that lies at the heart of one of the worlds greatest authors.
SERVICES
Brand strategy
Brand identity
Packaging design
Print design
Web design
Agatha Christie is the most widely read author in the world. Despite this accolade, the brand seemed to be losing saliency with younger readers and audiences. It seemed bogged down in the past and lacked excitement. The business challenge was to find out what makes the brand so powerful and find a strategy to communicate that to an emerging book buying and television watching audience.
BEFORE
AFTER
We worked extensively with the brand owners, including the grandson of Agatha Christie, in a series of workshops to really drill down into the brand to define exactly what makes her stories so compelling for her devotees and what elements we could dial-up in order to attract a new generation of readers and watchers.
At the heart of all Christies, works is the fact that these are murder stories. This fact often gets overlooked and it was our mission to put this sense of menace and threat back into the brand.
We needed to escape from this twee image of polite English society and find a new tone of voice for the brand. For inspiration, we looked to the work of another British legend, the photojournalist, Don McCullin. Specifically his pictures of the English landscape which project an entirely different view of the English countryside. Dark, brooding, and still. They depicted the feeling of menace and threat we were looking for.
The collective noun for crows is a ‘murder’ of crows. We selected the image of a crow as the perfect icon for a brand concerned with murder stories. We combined this image with a stylised version of the Christie signature and a somber colour palette of black and white replaced the ‘chocolate box’ style illustrations used on much of the packaging.
