Quaker Oats Research

“For more than 140 years, Quaker has been the leading expert in oats, combining science, scale, passion, and expertise, and dedicated to determining ways to transform the oat into products that help people benefit from their goodness.”

Quaker is a staple well-loved American brand that has existed for over 140 years. Well established and a classic in many homes, Quaker has risen to the top of the market with strong healthy themes behind its brand ethos. The prestigious company sports excellent branding down to its respected reputation. Health is a huge part of who Quaker is - their website and ad campaigns mostly focus on the many health benefits of oats such as heart health, energy, and digestive health. They even hosted their own health-focused festival - ‘Rise and Thrive Wellness Festival’.

Although Quaker’s branding is based around maintaining a healthy lifestyle it is clear to see that they are not targeted at a young audience. Designer Victoria Macey produced a series of short advertisements for them that visually communicated the health benefits of the product whilst maintaining a strong branded colour scheme and a simple educational effect. These are satisfactory for the current age range as they get the message across in an interesting way, however, more strides need to be made in order to reach out to children and encourage them to eat healthily. It is incredibly interesting to see the difference in the effort that is made between brands like Quaker, who are ethical in terms of food health, and McDonald’s, who are the opposit, at reaching out and engaging with children. It’s important and necessary that more healthy food brands make an effort when it comes to their own branding with how they are going to make children interested in their product.

Furthermore, reviewing Quaker’s branding and packaging over the past few years - it seems to be a bit of a shambles. The logo was updated to a confident new banner shape - which works well at framing the reworked type and established ‘Quaker Man’. Despite this successful new logo, however, the brand slowly rolled it out across it’s over 40 different sub-brands of cereals and oatmeal, etc. This created some discontinuity and didn’t resonate with the esteemed nature of the brand. A lot of the packaging designs also seem quite bland and don’t stand out amongst other cereal brands.