What does corporate publishing have to do with hurting people? And what does it have to do with barbecuing and meat? The answer is surprisingly simple: Ana Parreira and Holger Schmidhuber’s clients include the company Weber-Stephen, formerly rather an unknown inventor and manufacturer of round barbecues – a brand previously known in Europa, and above all in Germany, among real barbecue fans, but which has since become a cult bbq-grill among all age groups.

»In the beginning there was fire.« And this was associated with the idea of survival – being outdoors, shared experiences, togetherness, enjoyment, the camp fire. As such, the barbecue cult not only brings us back to social interaction, but also represents a pleasant slowdown and relaxation. This core of the brand gave birth to an entire communications strategy: popup stores with a limited lifetime, a magazine, and barbecue workshops. The connecting element is friends getting together to have fun at unusual locations. This includes stories around the theme of barbecuing, which is not only perceived as a tough world – after all it is mainly men and hardly women who do the barbecuing.

»Tool« for »attitude«. Shortly after beginning their cooperation with Weber, Parreira and Schmidhuber felt as if they had landed in a plastic world: interchangeable images between clichés and »what everyone is doing«, unemotional marketing. Both designers wanted to achieve something new with the Weber brand: an attitude, a position, to create awareness. Awareness about the origins of the meat to be barbecued, for example. Or about a clear positioning of the brand – instead of interchangeable standard photos of smiling people, they wanted to see unique characters and individual stories. Unpolished stories preferably »where you could see a bit of dirt«, Ana Parreira says with a grin.

And unpolished charm comes across well – the first issue of the barbecue magazine managed by Holger Schmidhuber and Ana Parreira won an award. Whether attitude that gets across the message that barbecuing is »much more than merely a piece of meat« or »is only a grill«. Quality, in fact.
»Meeeeeeeaaaaaaaat!!!!« someone whoops on the designer duo’s presentation film.

Ana Parreira and Holger Schmidhuber online: www.fuenfwerken.com