Portfolio›Case studies›Pronaca›TQMA — endorsement brand·Pronaca · 2022–2023

TQMA: the brand Pronaca created to talk to households directly.

A family in Guayaquil decides what to cook on a Tuesday by opening a recipe from TQMA — a brand they follow, from a company that makes their chicken. Every day, 6.5 million people meet Pronaca that way. TQMA is the endorsement brand I built so a manufacturer of twenty-two products could have one relationship with the household instead of twenty-two labels.

Endorsement brand strategyOwned mediaContent ecosystemBrand identityCommunity

The objective

Turn a food manufacturer into a brand that different generations feel close to.

Stated exactly that way in the committee, under one concept: "Vive bien, vive saludable" — live well, live healthy. The strategic problem underneath it was structural. A master brand that only shows up on the back of a package earns respect and no affection, and affection is what makes a household choose you twice.

The social landscape was not helping. Between 2022 and 2023 the platforms in Ecuador stopped moving in one direction: the largest network shed 1.5% of users and another lost 17%, while a third grew 11%. Betting the relationship on any single platform was betting on the wrong horse on purpose.

The recommendation

Separate the endorsement from the conversation.

Strengthen TQMA as the brand that interacts with digital communities, carrying the quality endorsement of the parent company. The manufacturer guarantees; the endorsement brand talks. Each does the job it is actually good at.

The role of the portfolio underneath it

Show the company as an ally of consumers, offering brands that meet their needs with quality, affordable products, promoting a healthy lifestyle — across every category in the house.

Value-added products Poultry Pork Beef Fish Preserves Eggs Pet food

The consolidated system

An owned-media estate reaching 6.5 million.

Not a media plan — a media estate. Every one of these is owned or directly operated, which means the reach compounds instead of being rented back every quarter. Six of the eight channels are below; the two publishing titles appear in the recipe section that follows. Consolidated maximum reach across the system: 6.5 million.

Web

tqma.com.ec

592k

unique users in 2022 · 52k monthly average. The hub the rest of the system points at.

Database

Mailing

300k+

records. Owned addressable audience — the asset nobody can switch off.

Product

Pronaca TQMA app

2,700

downloads · 960 active users. Small, and the only channel with a real feedback loop.

Social

TikTok

13,400

followers, plus influencer activation — the entry point to the younger cohort.

Editorial

Digital magazine

4,400

average visitors. Long-form space the social feed cannot hold.

Trade

Su Tienda magazine

shopkeepers reached. The traditional channel reads on paper, so we published on paper.

The trade title is the one most people would have cut. In a market where a large share of protein moves through neighbourhood shops, a magazine that reaches nine thousand shopkeepers is not nostalgia — it is distribution.

The recipe ecosystem

Recipes were the content engine, because recipes are how food brands get invited in.

Nobody wants a relationship with a poultry company. Everybody wants to know what to cook on Tuesday. Recipes turned the portfolio into daily utility, and the same content ran across print, app and web instead of being produced three times.

Print · May 2022

Magia en tu Cocina

500 copies. A physical cookbook as a brand object — the format people keep in the kitchen rather than scroll past.

Print · December 2022

Mi Receta Preferida 2022

300 copies. The consumer-facing recipe programme, published as a book at the highest-consumption moment of the year.

Digital

App & web recipes

The same library, addressable and measurable — where a recipe becomes a basket rather than a page view.

Mi Receta Preferida also ran as a CRM programme against the consumer base — see the Pronaca case for the 250,000-record base and the 1.75 million reach it delivered across seven mailings.

Brand identity

Fifteen routes to find out what the brand was actually called.

TQMA is an acronym of its own promise — te quiero mejor alimentado, "I want you better fed". That creates a design problem most brands never face: the logo has to carry a sentence, or the name means nothing.

We ran the exploration in two tracks. The agency delivered three variations on a single idea. In parallel the in-house team produced twelve, which is the part I would defend in any review: keeping an internal creative capability meant we could argue with the agency from a position of alternatives rather than opinion, and iterate in days instead of rounds.

The exploration board as it went to committee: existing mark at the top, three agency routes, twelve in-house routes below. The questions underneath are structural — does the phrase lock up with the parent endorsement or with the TQMA mark, and does the heart contain the words or sit beside them.

The real decision

Which mark endorses

Routes split between locking to the parent company mark and locking to TQMA — the same strategic question as the brand architecture, answered in a logo.

The real decision

Symbol or sentence

A heart that holds the phrase reads as a brand; a phrase that sits under a heart reads as a campaign. One survives a decade, the other a season.

The real decision

Agency or in-house

Twelve internal routes against three external ones changed the negotiation — and the internal team kept the capability afterwards.

What it changed

An endorsement brand is an asset with a balance sheet.

Consolidating eight owned channels under one brand turned scattered marketing activity into a measurable audience the company controls: a 300,000-record database, a web property with half a million annual users, an app with a feedback loop, and a trade title that reaches the channel where the volume actually moves.

The identity work is what made that consolidation legible. Eight channels only add up to one estate if they look and speak like one brand.

In your company

What this looks like when you bring it in.

What you get

One brand that carries your guarantee and does the talking

Your product brands keep selling; one brand builds the relationship.

What builds up

An owned-media estate that reaches millions

Community, site, app, magazine and list — reach that compounds instead of being rented back.

What you stop paying for

Twenty-two separate audiences

One content operation feeds every brand you own.