“Putting Life into Life” Developing the ZESPRI® Brand
In 1996 the New Zealand kiwifruit industry decided to brand its fruit, so that everyone around the world could choose it by name.
New Zealand kiwifruit already had a reputation for exciting tangy-sweet flavor, great quality and consistency, but a good brand identity could help shoppers quickly find the fruit in a busy market.
The new brand name needed to have some meaning – not a literal meaning necessarily but needed an immediate association with the vitality great quality kiwifruit can bring to everyday life.
People who were interviewed told researchers that to them kiwifruit meant, “vibrant, vigorous, healthy, nutritious, effervescent, zesty, full of life, full of fun and full of energy.”
Those messages had to be captured in a word – an enticing word with no negative connotations – distinctive, capturing the essence of New Zealand kiwifruit, and be able to be trademarked around the world.
So a new word was created … by a computer. All of the desired terms and connotations were input, and out of that computer spilled the word ZESPRI™ – bare as a newborn baby.
Many people think that ZESPRI is an acronym, but it isn’t. It is a computer-generated word that identifies the world’s finest kiwifruit.
People have told researchers that ZESPRI® Kiwifruit is, “ugly as sin, tasty as hell”; that it “enlivens the senses”; is like “beauty and the beast” and appeals on both a physical and spiritual level. “It’s like having a shower,” said one Japanese consumer, “physically good and emotionally uplifting.”
In short, ZESPRI® Kiwifruit “puts life into life.”
