Beer market leader Lion Brewery recently completed the largest and most extensive repackaging in its 125-year history with an aim to strengthening the company's soft alcohol portfolio. Lion brews, bottles and markets four of Sri Lanka's most popular brands - flagship brand Lion Lager, Lion Stout,  Strong Beer, and Carlsberg. Its 546,000 hecto-litre brewery at Biyagama is equipped with the latest brewing technology and was commissioned in 1997.

Executive Director/CEO Suresh Shah, Marketing Director Prasanna Amarasinghe, and Marketing Manager Wasantha Heenetigala, were in their office and factory complex at Biyagama recently, discussing the direction that Lion took to develop a powerful message about their brands in a tough and competitive environment where the most obvious means - advertising in the media - was barred.

The repackaging of Lion Lager, Lion Stout, and Strong Beer, was undertaken to strengthen the positioning of their beer portfolio against aggressive competition: "For example, we anticipate the entry of top global brand Heineken and we need to be one step ahead of the rest," noted Suresh Shah.

He also stressed the importance the packaging would now play: "It all comes down to the packaging, which is now decisive. It involves using it effectively to convey our brand message, and what it stands for to the consumer."

When Lion last changed their packaging in the early 1990s, they used Interbrand, the world's leading brand design consultancy. This time, their decision was to use local specialists. Michel Nugawela, one of Sri Lanka's leading brand designers, was called into the 17-month long assignment - the longest, Nugawela said, that he had ever worked on.

"The packaging really challenged us from all aspects - intellectually as well as technically. First, the Brewery had assembled a team - Marketing, Production, Market Research, Design, and Structural Engineering - to work on the new bottle and labels," Nugawela said. "In the 17-months of our assignment, we developed a massive range of options. What we shortlisted was then sent on for cross-checking to Krones in Germany, who developed the configurations and provided the machinery at the bottling plant. You can imagine how challenging this all was, where people from different disciplines and departments all got together to achieve a  common objective," he added. Shah also noted the complexity of the assignment, stating that the new bottle had to be designed so that it could run on the normal assembly line. The bottle design had to fit that diameter as a change to the assembly line specifications would have involved an exorbitant cost. "Even designing the label is not as easy as it looks," he said. "It has to fit perfectly on the bottle - the slightest centimeter here or there would be a problem and expertise on the perfect sizes and shapes for both the bottle and labels had to come from the equipment supplier."

"We wanted a 'new voice' to highlight the brand, a new profile to promote what we call 'legendary leadership' - essentially, this is all about the values a lion has," Shah said, standing before all the new bottles and labels displayed on the office conference table.

The decision to change the shape of the bottle was one of the most important aspects of the packaging. "There was an exhaustive amount of qualitative research that went into the packaging and one of the main points that came through was the shape of the bottle. We needed to transform the current bottle - which was seen as passive and functional - into an integral part of the packaging," says Marketing Director Prasanna Amarasinghe. "The bottle really needed to connect with the consumer emotionally. This would also be a very important way of differentiating ourselves from the competition, and developing the association of pride that the consumer wanted to feel."

Nugawela's challenge was to integrate Lion's brand values such as 'leadership' and 'pride' into the packaging. "There were two areas to the packaging design: the structure, or the shape of the bottle, and the graphics. What was important was that the brand personality, the 'legendary leadership' of a lion, was communicated through both areas," said Nugawela. "The research was telling us that the Lion consumer definitely wanted a change. The main challenge, of course, was to address how the design could achieve this by communicating the brand values.