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PA Consulting’s (PA's) first, annual survey on U.S. brands, finds consumers are looking for brands to be a catalyst for a better world.

Our survey of 7,000 U.S. consumers found they want brands to operate sustainably, use responsibly sourced materials, and actively champion good causes that cultivate community.

Campaign design challenge:
—An annual Index requires an idea rich enough to provide a wellspring for creative renewal, spanning years.
—As a data-driven report, we need a design system capable of eye-catching activations, and highly consumable data visualisations.
—It needs to instantly signal its subject-matter to a highly design-literate audience, and relatable across sectors from FMCG to social media influencers.

Creative response:

We focussed on the idea of ‘packshots’—a universal visual language of brands.

A packshot is defined as a still or moving image of a product, usually including its packaging and labelling, used to show the product in advertising.

Packshots have evolved into a creative sub-discipline, with its own visual logic: a perfume bottle shown artfully ‘exploding’ from its packaging; or a mass-produced bottle, raised on a pedestal, photographed like a fashion model. No-one questions these tropes, and we wanted to leverage their ubiquity and familiarity, as the framework of a design system.

Adobe Illustrator is ideal for replicating man-made surfaces. And live text and saleable vector-based graphics, it is perfect for media adaptations. It also lends executions an ‘uncanny’ feel, which helps avoid confusion with actual brands.

The trope of a pedestal became symbolic of category evaluation and ranking, with a grided backdrop implying systematic analysis.

Our design system incorporated three levels:
—‘Hero’ imagery to evoke brands as our subject matter
—‘Spotlight’ imagery, based on packaging design, is used to create smile-in-the-mind ways to enliven key stats.
—'Data' utilises the typographic language of product-label information.

We used our visual identity to create a branded consistency across the category illustrations: this included designing ‘products’ based on our rules for type scaling and image aspect ratios.

We anticipate evolving this concept over many years. Roll-on 2025…!