The Brand Identity

The food brand Cocorico has long been an advocate for animal welfare, environmental stewardship and health awareness—areas which consumers have become increasingly attuned to in the past decade. As a growing business, however, Cocorico has lagged on the visual and communications front over the years, concentrating company efforts on research and development. To bring the brand up to speed, Pentagram aligned and refined the brand’s overall strategy, creating a corporate identity expressed through a new wordmarque, bespoke typeface, visual identity, packaging design and custom publishing.

Wordmarque Onomatopoeia
Cocorico is the sound of a rooster’s wake up call popularised by the French and every language has its own phonetic rendition. In Germany, they say kikeriki. In Dutch it’s kukeleku; in Portuguese they say cucurucu; and the Finnish say kukko kiekuu. On the brand design front, the Cocorico wordmarque utilises cyclical and geometric forms informed by the rhythm and pace of the four syllables in the word Cocorico. The shapes in the wordmarque itself resemble chickens and their downward pecking gait across the farm grounds. The Cocorico heritage signet manifests the rooster in the Cocorico visual identity and iterates the company’s legacy and accumulated know-how since its founding in 1982.

Branding Strategy and Linguistic Identity
As a pillar of the branding strategy, Cocorico’s visual assets and communications have been reconciled to create an experiential brand around Cocorico’s values centred on providing the most natural, healthy and sustainable chicken. “The All-Natural Chicken Brand” positioning claim, a result of an in-depth brand audit, is derived from the food company’s brand ethos focused on fresh food, ethical production standards and social responsibility.

Building upon the linguistic audit and following findings from a Cocorico nutraceutical report, narratives have been developed around the world of protein, highlighting the protein content of Cocorico poultry and why the cleanest chicken produces high quality protein.

Visual Identity
The visual identity opts for a pared down aesthetic. The photographic language celebrates chicken and praises food production in unexpected juxtapositions, especially in its raw form. The entirety of the Cocorico poultry range is captured in macro shots, high contrast layouts and rich colours. The photographic direction on the B2C end represents the brand’s love of the entire food universe – a mélange of tastes and senses combined to perfection. It is a return to slow living and high quality food, inspiring consumers to get back into the kitchen, get together with their tribe, or even experiment on their own.

The illustration suite for Cocorico’s Ready to Eat range is vibrant and captivating with ample white space. The illustrations offer a youthful perspective and are animated through plenty of movement. Emphasis is placed on fresh and natural ingredients and how to prepare chicken-based meals.

The brand’s master colour palette appearing across the entire product range and key visuals, consists of Cocorico Blue, Sky Blue, Orange Beak and Dark Clover. Cocorico Blue, the main brand colour symbolises liberty and stakes itself as a primary colour along with red and yellow. Sky Blue is redolent of open spaces and fresh air, Orange Beak indicates a healthy chicken’s beak and Dark Clover references the farm grounds.

Typeface Swatch
The display typeface CCRC Display Pro’s contrast between thick and thin serifs is particularly suited for culinary applications. With softly flared strokes, it is sharp yet pared back and is rhythmically balanced with the sans serif typeface suite, CCRC Text Pro. The latter further references the Cocorico wordmarque to create balance, impact and synergy between the textual components.

Digital Platform and Custom publishing
The Company is Cocorico’s corporate arm on the website, home to many of the brand’s touchpoints including its heritage timeline, “The Cocorico Truth” dispelling fact and fiction surrounding poultry consumption, its full range of raw poultry products and Ready to Eat range, as well as its “10 Reasons to Buy Cocorico” and more. Both The Health Hub and The Company provide a wholistic view into Cocorico, with the website serving as one of the brand’s primary activation points.

The creative direction also extends to custom publishing in the form of The Health Hub, an offshoot of the Pentagram-designed website, featuring health-centric articles, recipes, cookbooks, wellness profiles, interviews and pantry items. Part of the experiential branding encompasses POS design and a QR campaign enabling shoppers to scan chicken packages linking back to healthy recipes on the Cocorico website, making The Health Hub a central point of the brand.