If there is one topic that we all face but none of us want to talk about, it’s death.
While some progress has been made in recent years, end of life planning tools are still rife with legal mazes, paved with anxiety and managed by grey, ill-fit- suits.
Wills, death, life insurance, estate planning, lawyers, fear, more death, rinse repeat.
Rebranding death requires deep and honest examination of what we want this moment to mean for the dying as well their loved ones and community.
We needed to open our hearts to the experience to recognize that the entire system was defective, out of touch with contemporary values, and in need of a complete overhaul.
We believed the category itself was broken, and that the opportunity was bigger than renaming a product in a whitewash market.
It was greater than a simple brand exercise, it was a spur to re-thinking how society thought about and processed the inevitable.
For us to act in a way that returned a dividend both to the consumer, and the brand’s bottom line.
From birth onwards our lives are punctuated with points of celebration. Death isn’t one of those. But what if we viewed death—in all its sadness and complexity—as an equal celebration of life’s great moments?
To do so we borrowed a mnemonic heavily associated with celebration—a cake —and used that as the crown of our task to tackle the last taboo head on.
Oh, and the product is as easy as cake to use.
The design strategy, saw us round out the brand to be more accessible, brought in illustration to remove the barrier of “end of life is conversation is photos of old people” and created an icon that borrows codes of a tapestry – which from far away look like one thing, but when you zoom in has lots of threads of detail without which, the big picture means nothing.
