When we started working with Gordon’s, they asked us to breathe new life into an old and tired legend. Brands like Hendricks and Sipsmith have grown the gin category (and their own market share), by focusing on botanical ingredients, purpose and provenance. The rest of the gin category has rushed to follow them, and a predictable formula for communications had emerged: complex and ornate visuals, often harking back to (a usually nonexistent) heritage.

As the category leader, we didn’t want to stoop to the level of the competition and fight on their terms – dramatizing granular product or provenance differences.

Instead we decided to own the category benefit. How gin makes you feel.

So rather than jumping straight into a traditional creative briefing, we made a brand book that explored the feeling of gin. We spoke to lots of people, held research across the world, and scribbled plenty of notes at the agency local pub too. And bit by bit, we built The Book of Ginfulness – a 70 page (and counting) ode to the feeling of gin.

The process taught us that gin has a special place in people’s hearts, and that we could have fun with the liquid itself – we didn’t need to borrow interest from elsewhere. And it confirmed gin’s association with summer, taking time out and relaxing. This brought us to the essence of gin; an invitation. To take time out, to switch off, to skip out, to bunk off.
So we wrote an invitation we could communicate all the different feelings of gin under…

While other brands talk about ingredients using complex visual worlds, Gordon’s talks about what gin really feels like, using a simple brand world — colourful, all about the drink and lit by sunlight.

And using the relaxing, gin-like tones of Roger Allam, we created a colourful film world of gin-like thoughts.