Gamechanger, lifesaver
‘Game-changing’ is one of the most overused terms around. So what do you say when branding a product that actually does change the game?
This was the case with Sure Chill, a cooling technology with the potential to transform refrigeration across the world; especially in developing countries, where keeping supplies cool is a matter of life and death.
Sure Chill was invented by True Energy, sustainable energy technology innovators based in a small village in Wales, the UK, but with ambitions to change how the whole world powers things.
This single-minded and astute business decision presented us, as creators of brands, with an interesting challenge: how do you turn a product brand into a company brand?
We’d worked with True Energy a few years earlier, on a comprehensive brand identity project. At that point, True Energy made a number of different products, from solar panels to wind turbines, of which Sure Chill was just one. The organisation’s focus was not just on making energy technologies more sustainable, but also making them more attainable for people living in developing countries.
Why should essentials such as street lighting and refrigeration be the preserve of developed nations?
As the brand bedded in and the business matured, it became clear that among True Energy’s product range there was one superstar — Sure Chill.
Sure Chill is an entirely different approach to cooling technology. Reaching beyond just improved refrigeration, it signals a new breed of cooling that breaks reliance on grid energy.It keeps medical supplies and perishable food at the perfect temperature for days on end after being charged for just a few hours.
Its potential to change the way the world keeps things cool was such that the True Energy team made the strategic decision to change the company name to Sure Chill. With this, they chose to focus solely on marketing Sure Chill to leading organisations in the humanitarian field, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as multinational food and beverage retailers.
As the brand bedded in and the business matured, it became clear that among True Energy’s product range there was one superstar.
– Sure Chill
This single-minded and astute business decision presented us, as creators of brands, with an interesting challenge: how do you turn a product brand into a company brand? This wasn’t the only challenge. Sure Chill is not made from wires and bolts. It’s based on water’s ability to maintain a constant temperature of 4°C — this is what powers Sure Chill’s technology. So, how do you brand a scientific principle?
Big challenges, big questions
These are big challenges, yes. But they’re also the questions that excite us. The answers, as always, begin with finding the single most powerful truth about the product.
Sure Chill’s freedom from the grid doesn’t just mean it makes refrigeration more reliable in areas prone to power cuts. It actually makes refrigeration possible where it simply wasn’t before — in remote African villages or the mountains of North India, for instance.
Big challenges are also the questions that excite us. The answers, as always, begin with finding the single most powerful truth.
Keeping food and drink chilled is important, of course. But even more so, in these areas, is the ability to keep life-saving vaccines in perfect condition. When vaccines become too warm or too cold, they quickly lose potency. You see, then, the challenge for medics travelling long distances to provide vital care. In this case, reliable refrigeration is not a luxury; it’s a life saver.
It was this almost magical property of Sure Chill — its ability to make what should be impossible cooling, possible — that inspired our creative thinking. This was a new kind of cold. It was cold reinvented. So we set about creating an identity to tell this story.
Creative inspiration
Visualising cool was not easy, we discovered. It’s a feeling, not an image. We also had to avoid any visual references to ice — freezing temperatures are just as damaging as warmer temperatures to food, drink and medical goods alike. Initial ideas and visual representations of cool met with resistance from the Sure Chill team, who was all too aware of the damage that any association with ice could incur.
Inspiration instead came, perhaps counter-intuitively for a product so future-focused, from old mythological representations of cold — the swirling-faced gods from Nordic mythology, who represent the awesome power of the natural elements, of wind and cold.
We took these images and reinterpreted them as icons of natural power for a modern age. More angular, more stripped back, more intriguing. We created an unusual, minimalist logo that symbolises an entirely new kind of cold that works in an entirely new way, but which is based on a principle that’s existed since the beginning of time.
Telling a clear, compelling story
The visual identity was just one part of the telling of the story. One of the greatest barriers to people buying into Sure Chill was explaining how the technology worked. People simply could not believe that a technology as seemingly simple as Sure Chill was worth the investment. How do you convince the head of procurement at Coca Cola that their stock is going to be kept perfectly chilled by a water-powered refrigerator?
Yet when speaking to the inventor of the technology, an unassuming but brilliant engineer, you were left in no doubt of the simple genius of Sure Chill. He spoke eloquently about how inspiration for the cooling technology came from a walk by a frozen lake. He was struck by the fact that even though the top of the lake was frozen, fish could still swim underneath.
It was the physics of water that meant this could happen. Water above or below 4°C always rises to the top, forming ice on top of the lake or, conversely, creating the bubbles that rise to the top of a boiling pan of water. In the case of the lake, it means that all the water beneath the ice is the perfect temperature to store food, beverages and life-saving vaccines. We decided to turn this charming story into an animation, which showed that the law of physics powering Sure Chill was simple.
The brilliance lay in applying it to a cooling technology.
Life-saving results
The new identity and the website are stunning. Your branding expertise and creativity helped us bring everything together to make something very special. We did it! And it feels good.
– Peter Saunders OBE, Chairman, Sure Chill
This was a brand project that stretched us. We had to work hard to understand the technology and then find ways of communicating this with clarity and simplicity — without ever over-simplifying the technology. Not easy.
But it worked. Sure Chill was happy. We were happy.
“The new identity and the website are stunning. Your branding expertise and creativity helped us bring everything together to make something very special. We did it! And it feels good,” said Peter Saunders OBE, Sure Chill’s chairman.
And in the year following the brand relaunch, Sure Chill was awarded $1.4 million by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to use its ground-breaking technology to develop a life-saving vaccine cooler.
These are the kind of results we like.
