Google Retail
Explainer Animation
Project Snapshot
Campaign: Google Retail interactive resource launch
Audience: Retailers and retail businesses across Europe
Services: Creative strategy, character development, animation, sound design and post-production
Deliverables: 3 x explainer animations
Rollout: Expanded across additional European markets
Making Retail Technology Easy to Understand
Google was launching a new suite of interactive resources designed to help retailers make better use of its digital tools - they needed a creative way to communicate the value of each one.
Working in partnership with Good Practice, Bearded Fellows developed three explainer animations covering three distinct retail challenges: attracting local shoppers through Google My Business, improving mobile performance with Speed Scorecard, and using Google Analytics to make smarter decisions through data and insights.
The intention was to make each tool immediately understandable while creating a consistent visual identity that could work across different retail audiences and European markets.
Three Tools. Three Retail Stories.
Rather than explaining the technology through product demonstrations or feature-heavy messaging, we built each animation around a different retail character and environment.
Each character represented a relatable retail scenario, giving audiences a clear human context for understanding how the tools could be used in practice. This allowed the animations to communicate Google's products through everyday retail challenges.
Before developing the full animations, we created three 10-second character and environment tests. These gave Google and Good Practice an opportunity to review the visual direction, character design and tone before production began, helping establish a clear and consistent creative language across the campaign.
A Visual Language Built to Scale
With three different stories to tell, consistency was central to the production. We developed a flexible visual system that allowed each character and environment to feel distinctive while remaining recognisably part of the same campaign.
Sound played an equally important role: we created a subtle soundscape combining music and carefully designed sound effects. This added energy and atmosphere to the animations without competing with the information being communicated.
The result was a set of explainers that felt engaging and accessible while keeping the focus firmly on the tools and their practical value to retailers.
A Europe-Wide Rollout
The animations launched as part of Google's retail resources campaign, helping communicate three different digital tools through a simple, character-led approach.
The work was particularly successful in demonstrating how a consistent creative framework could be adapted for different audiences and markets. Google was so impressed with the animations that the campaign was subsequently rolled out across additional countries in Europe.
By combining relatable storytelling, clear visual communication and a scalable animation approach, Bearded Fellows helped turn complex digital tools into accessible content that could work across Google's wider European retail audience.
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