US – Coffee brand Mozzo has turned to London agency B&B to rebrand in a bid to cut through the crowded ‘purposeful’ category and move away from Italian associations.
B&B is behind the branding on Fever-Tree, Pip n Nut and Pret at Home, and its challenge with Mozzo was to shine a light on its work with coffee-growing communities. The coffee brand’s USP is that a fixed social dividend is built into its business model, ensuring constant accountability and continued investment into its C2C Fund with every coffee bean sold. Since 2015, the brand has funded the build and first year’s operation of a maternity clinic on Idjwi Island, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and helped coffee farmers in the African country to found their own start-up cooperative, empowering them to manage their own production and introduce sustainable growing practices. Mozzo is currently working on new projects with its coffee-growers in Nicaragua.
The new mint green and bright orange branding is centred around a core tagline of ‘Coffee. Community. Connection.’ The logo, designed with digital animation in mind, reflects the idea of connection through an extended Z, and seeks to present Mozzo Coffee as a platform for communication.
‘The existing Mozzo identity took its cues from the world of Italian coffee,’ explains B&B associate creative director Jennie Potts, ‘but as a result it was hard to differentiate it from a lot of other brands and it had started to feel quite generic. We wanted to revitalise Mozzo, bringing back the energy it had back in 2005, when it was launched as a wind- and solar-powered coffee cart.’
Strategic opportunity
As seen in the spirits market, with new brands effectively decolonising and challenging cultural stereotypes, Mozzo’s rebranding highlights the need for identities to move further towards connection and purpose.