Did you know that Jesus is the most mentioned person, by name, in the Islamic holy book known as the Quran? Yes, it’s true and, one reason is that both Christianity and Islam are of the Abrahamic faith. Yes, Muslims recognise Jesus as one of the many important figures in their particular version of that faith group. However, Muslims do not celebrate the birth of Jesus as Christians do. Sure, Iran is predominantly a Muslim nation, and yes, there are Christian communities in it but was this why we chose to use Cristian symbolism in our seasonal greetings?
Marketing and advertising agencies in Iran will try to outdo one another when creating gifts. We, at Zigma8, have been doing this, year-on-year, since our inception. This year, however, was different. With increased familiarity with Christian celebrations in Iran, the gift-giving season has become a little overcrowded. This situation has invited a new challenge for advertising agencies in Iran, as some are now including Christmas. They want to send a message, but they don’t want it to get lost among the many others they and other agencies send. Our creative design studio team was excited at this challenge because it would put their print production capabilities in Iran to the test.
Our main challenge was a familiar challenge for us: how do we express our creativity in a way that will impress our clients, suppliers and friends? The trickier challenge was: how do we account for, and stand out during, the variety of closely packed occasions?
Packaging design can help enhance the perception of the item packaged. As one of the top marketing and advertising agencies in Iran, we at Zigma8 know this well. Our marketing and advertising campaigns in Iran are all about influencing opinions, and our packaging solutions do exactly that. With this in mind, we chose to embody a specific seasonally symbolic item as the package itself. Our choice is also related to an increased trend among Iranians. This trend is to decorate and display a Christmas tree during the festive period. We believe that this correlates with an existing decorative display put together by Iranian during a prominent calendar occasion, the Nowrouz (the Iranian New Year). For this occasion, Iranians will make a “sofreh haft seen”, a decorative display of seven items that begin with the letter s.
We chose to fill our tree-shaped packaging with boiled sweets. These could be consumed alone or shared among friends and family. This concept of sharing correlated with Christmas and would be the theme used in the social media presence of the gift.
Our seasonal gift was well received and achieved the exact results we were after. We know this because our clients, suppliers and friends still had them on their tables a month later. Amusingly, this is counter the Christian practice of taking the trees down after a certain number of days. We saw this a testament to our abilities with creative print production in Iran.