Product Strategy & Direction

Cargill's Charter Reserve Deli Program

Efficiently Creating Consumer Awareness on a Limited Program Budget

Product Strategy, Creative Direction, Multi-Channel Coupon Program Creation, User Journey Maps, Wireframes

Cargill, one America's largest privately held companies and an influencial player in the agriculture and food industries, tasked Barkley and 40Digits to flesh out the digital product strategy and branding of its new Charter reserve deli program and brand of meats and cheeses.

In my role, I drove the overall creative direction of the program's digital presence, which would also include the creation of a retail point-of-purchase coupon system (with accompanying UX research and documentation unable to be shown on my portfolio) to drive traffic back to the website and create consumer awareness of the Charter Reserve brand.

Creating a Distinct Visual Brand & User Interface

Competitive research revealed a marketplace full of Old World, Bavarian-inspired identity systems with heavy Gothic typefaces and lots of brown, maroon, and gold. While the packaging design was already relatively clean and elegant, the digital team had an opportunity to extend that even further on the website. Ultimately, the brand ended up with a clean and elegantly modern design treatment that stood out boldly amongst a sea of homogeonous competitors.

The relatively small footprint of the site combined with the research that said consumers simply don't pay much attention to or spend time on these types of websites gave us the confidence to introduce a UI system that would also help clearly differentate Charter Reserve from its competitors. Using push state URLs and pushing the Craft CMS to its limit gave us a simple master-page website that would still perform well for organic search if optimized by the dev and search teams.

Fig. 1: Left Aligned Sticky Menu System
Fig. 2: Responsive Layouts

A Dash of Elegant Modernity in a Landscape of Old World Browns & Maroons

Full Case Study Coming Soon

Visit CharterReserve.com

In a world cluttered by confusing websites, too-clever apps, and mountains of unnavigable content, ensuring your customer can easily, effectively, and efficiently interact with your digital product makes a very real—and financial—difference.