Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

Our “Neighbourhood” packaging enhances brand experience by giving delivery customers a reusable piece of brand collateral (a takeaway bag designed to look like a classic Hanoi home) that is repurposable, reusable, and seasonally relevant. In a season of regifting, it’s your wrapping paper. In a season of storing memories, it’s worthy of your mantle. This unique approach also stimulates brand activation by leaving customers with a strong impression of a brand going above and beyond to do something different, unique, and downright neighborly. Picture frames invite them to see themselves within the brand. The restaurant does that, too.

Background

Our agency represents scores of restaurants across Hanoi, and we saw first hand how they were hit by the pandemic. Surviving on delivery alone, both they and their customers began to fray. Meanwhile, the streets of our beloved city began to fill with sad, discarded to-go boxes. One of our most forward-thinking partners, an alley-shaped gastropub aptly called “The Neighbourhood”, came to us with a brief: rethink their to-go packaging in the runup to Lunar New Year and make it more sustainable, memorable, and neighbourly. We wanted the packaging to tell the story of our city and its people. A story about human connection, and contact, at a time when all of us in Hanoi and around the world were feeling starved of it. This is packaging made for regifting, for celebrating, and for display. And just like the food inside, it’s best when shared.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Our big idea was simple: we made The Neighbourhood’s new packaging a mirror of the neighborhood we know and love here in Hanoi, with a collectible set of designs showcasing the diverse streetlife that we were all desperately missing. Each package design featured a miniature home or storefront that, when done transporting food, could be cleaned and reused as a photo frame or postcard. By giving the packaging multiple uses, we also gave it a life after delivery. What we love about this packaging campaign is the way it weaves together disparate creative threads in an elegant yet obvious way: the restaurant’s name, its commitment to place and community, the urgent need to keep our streets clean, and the Vietnamese culture of gift giving for the holidays. By launching it first as a seasonal campaign for the approaching Lunar New Year, we made the community connection even more salient.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

The food scene in Hanoi, while vibrant and rapidly evolving, is still mostly informal. So when restaurants deliver a meal to your house the dish may be delicious, but the packaging is often an afterthought. Our strategy with this packaging redesign for Hanoi bistro The Neighbourhood was to wow customers by going above and beyond, not just with beautifully designed set of collectible packaging, but with themed and reusable bags that could function as brand collateral (picture frames, postcards, and gift bags). These neighbourly, house-themed packages also get at what all of us Hanoians were so desperately missing during the pandemic—the hustle and bustle of our streets and sidewalks, noisy and alive. By being present with their customers in this hard time, and by brightening it with a bit of whimsy, The Neighborhood acted as a good neighbor, forming bonds that would last longer than COVID.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

This packaging design expands on long-term brand development work that we have done with The Neighbourhood, developing its logos and colorways, and a first iteration of beautiful to-go boxes for their food. This new house design is custom built to contain those original boxes, giving repeat delivery customers both something expected and something new with their orders. The new design was implemented over a period of three months, starting in October of 2021 just at the start of the Lunar New Year (Tet) holiday season. Bags and boxes were printed in bulk, and went out to 5,000 delivery customers. We exceeded the initial planned runs of the bags, as Hanoi entered severe COVID lockdowns during the end of the year and delivery became the only dining option.

List the results (30% of vote)

We rolled out new packaging for The Neighbourhood in the fall of 2021, in the runup to Tet Holiday, making the designs a prominent part of the brand experience on social media. Since the launch, the brand has seen organic growth of 150% of followers on Facebook and Instagram, and strong brand engagement with images and content about packaging. When the Government of Vietnam suspended all in-person dining for most of the fall, we increased print orders of the packaging to keep up with higher demand. Lockdown was brighted by user-generated content of customers interacting with the packaging, and of course the delicious food inside. Approximately 5,000 orders over this period kept The Neighbourhood in business, and when the lockdown ended dine-in rates skyrocketed to a level they had never reached before. The dining room at The Neighbourhood went from warm but quiet, to “reservations required”.

Please tell us about the cultural insight that inspired the work

Our creative concept for this packaging is founded on cultural specificity. Hanoi is a uniquely out-of-doors city, where neighbours share a kind of intimacy and family scenes that westerners may think of as domestic spill out into the streets. It’s not uncommon to cross the alley in pijamas to grab a coffee, or to sit upon the steps of your front door to get a haircut. When other countries around the world faced lockdowns, citizens had their comfortable domestic worlds to retreat to. In Hanoi, so much of that domestic world lies beyond the front door, and became inaccessible during the lockdown. Our appreciation of the unique emotional functions of a Hanoian neighbourhood, and our understanding of what our fellow citizens were missing, were fundamental to the genesis of this campaign.