G whiz!

It would appear that the fallout continues from Arnell’s work with Pepsi.

Ad Age reports online today that the Gatorade brand will undergo some major shifts in response to an 18% sales decline earlier this year. The article says,

“Gatorade is looking to innovate itself out of a sales slump and will spend some $30 million on product and packaging development to do so. The granddaddy of the sports-drink category is pushing forward with plans to introduce “G Series,” a grouping of three product categories, while giving another facelift to its core product lines.”

This work includes the second redesign of the Thirst Quencher and G2 lines, this year. Big surprise, Arnell is reportedly not involved in the redesign.

The coverage in the last year, on the multi-brand Arnell debacle, has been extensive to say the least. There is little need to editorialize on the subject. I just hope that the brand design industry does not suffer unduly from our association with the gross incompetence of one firm. But I must admit that to solely blame Arnell is too easy.

As one of my colleagues mentioned recently, he has had several clients tell him at the beginning of the design process, “please don’t do an Arnell to our brand”. The tough part will be to look at what was apparently a systemic failure in the way brand value is appraised, consumer response anticipated, and design equity is assessed, then try and learn from the experience.

Finally, successful brands are by definition about the careful and deliberate building of equity over time. As Massimo d’Amore, CEO of PepsiCo’s Americas Beverages group said in the Ad Age piece, “When we announced the move to G, I said it would be a multi-year journey, and it is. This will probably be over a three year journey”. That is almost always true with my clients when we undergo the evolution of a brand with as much equity as Gatorade. With respect to Mr d’Amore, and as a devoted Gatorade consumer, I doubt that the journey plan included this redesign in year two.

Unfortunately, this latest episode adds another chapter to the design school and business school texts.

Gen Y and open source brand design

Bruce Nussbaum, the design columnist at Business Week, was in South Korea last week and gave a provocative speech to the Design Korea 2009 International Conference. He spoke about what he feels are the “5 most powerful global forces transforming our lives.”

His discussion of one of these forces, demographics, or more specifically the rise of the Millenial generation and the fall of the Baby Boomers, got me thinking about the potentially dramatic implications on the design of brands and packaging. Here’s why.

For much of the last half of the 20th century two things were happening in tandem, the growth of large sophisticated global brands and the maturation of the baby boom generation. An awful lot of brand growth happened simply to take advantage of the various life stages and needs of this generation. Until recently, these brands have tended to be monolithic, one-size-fits-all, and often very narcissistic.

But as Nussbaum points out Gen Y has “a unique and powerful culture—urban, collaborative, participatory, green, generative – it likes to use tools and make things – , public, pan-ethnic, trans-gender and trans-national.” This sounds like a generation that is going to want a branding message, and package design, that is much more collaborative, much more interactive, and certainly much more fluid in their identity.

There are three important words in that last sentence that begin to sound like any open source idea,

Fluid, Interactive, and Collaborative.

These words pose an interesting question, to which I propose three possible solutions to the dilemma marketers may be facing when trying to appeal to this new generation of consumers.

First the question.
How do you make old school brands like Tide, Colgate, or Budweiser, that matured throughout the 20th century, more fluid, interactive, and collaborative while still retaining their inherent brand values? And what role does the package play in this transformation?

Now the potential solution.
First, the package must become a more fluid brand symbol in all forms of media. The days of the stoic and passive beauty shot of the package in advertising is over.

Second, the package must become more interactive at retail. I have talked recently about some of the in-store smart phone app technology that is on the way. Whether through these tools or others, all packages will need to engage the consumer in the store.

Third, the package must become a more collaborative part of the consumer’s lifestyle. This needs to be a two-way thing. All brands will need to support what Nussbaum calls the “Learn-Share-Make culture” of this generation. The package can be one way to foster this relationship between the consumer and the brand.

This next decade will be an interesting time for brands. As the baby boom generation retires, it is likely to take with it many of the brand building approaches of the late 20th century, often based simply on frequency message and the power of a unified global idea.

The Gen Y consumer is likely to insist on a conversation not a lecture. And the conversation is likely to go something like this. Tell me about your product, if I like it I’ll share it with my friends, and together we will build a useful relationship with your brand.

Package design goes dirty

Steven Heller has a new piece on the AIGA site where he begins to discuss aesthetic trends in the design work of this first decade of the 21st century. He calls it “The Decade of Dirty Design”. This movement is creating some intriguing work, as shown at left, that is very different from the bland brands I wrote about last week.

His general point, made in a much more eloquent fashion than I am capable, is that as the decade progressed the momentum increased to reject the computer as the sole source for generating our design work. Influences like hand rendered typography, crudely sketched illustration, and the use of letterpress printing all seemed to take on added visibility. Much like the slow but steady increase in the use of the vinyl record recently. This seems to reflect the interest in a return to a pre-digital, messier, and arguably more authentic, or at least a more analog, approach to craftsmanship.

His point seems to have real validity, especially for designers who came of age during this decade. Look through the student work on sites like thedieline.com and lovelypackage.com. I think you’ll see a significant amount of “dirty” work. An interesting cultural shift for designers who, as a group, have never known a time when the computer was not the indispensable assembly, if not generative, tool of their profession.

In the research I have done for this blog on the package design history of the last century, it is evident that most aesthetic trends influencing the look of consumer package design seem to lag other forms of design media by a significant period of time. This is most certainly true for larger brands. There would seem to be many reasons for this, most importantly the appropriate use of a longer term view on the use of design elements incorporated into retail brand identity and package design.

Stated simply, when the stakes are extremely high and when the time horizons are very long term, as they tend to be with many global brands, design innovation and the use of the latest design aesthetic, for its own sake, is less likely to occur.

The notable exception to this is smaller brands in some specific categories. And here Steven Heller’s observations about the “dirty” trend in design certainly applies. It would be interesting to review where this creativity/innovation dividing line occurs, and what motivates it.

My sense is that the use of contemporary design aesthetics, as a major influence in retail brand design and packaging, may depend on a number of things including,

• The brand’s product category
• The age or other demographic characteristic of the consumer
• The size of the brand
• Whether this is a core product or promotional package
• Whether this is a new or existing product
• The design characteristics of category competition
• The design aesthetic of the retailer

In the few wonderful examples shown above, it is evident that some brand marketers are more willing than others to look at design approaches that reflect a current visual aesthetic.

And I would agree with Steven Heller, for some lately this means going dirty.

Acknowledgements

The images are from the site lovelypackage.com

Biomimicry and Package Design

As package designers have become more attuned to sustainable design as part of our creative process, many have begun to look at the lessons of the natural world, or biomimicry.

There has been a significant amount of research by a number of teams on the applicability of natural models to package design. And here are a few resources and links to people that are doing some interesting work.

A good place to start is with one of the most prominent experts in the field today, Janine Benyus, one of the founders of the Biomimicry Guild. Here is a link to a wonderful TED presentation called 12 Sustainable Design Ideas From Nature.

Package Design Magazine posted a good starter piece on biomimicry and package design, called “Sustainable Packaging, Nature as Model Measure, and Mentor” at their site packagedesignmag.com. In it Tim McGee, a biologist with the Biomimicry Guild , has written extensively about how package design could benefit from the specific design lessons of nature. He talks about what designers can learn from lettuce, ticks, peacocks and even the sandfish lizard.

The Biomimicry Guild even has a service they call “Biologist at The Design Table” where they offer the consultation of “biologists who are trained in the biomimicry design methodology and excel at helping develop products and processes which are sustainable, innovative, effective, cost-saving, and life-friendly.” Fascinating!

The Biomimicry Institute has a site that asks questions like how would nature create, self-cleaning surfaces, or color without chemicals or dyes, or a non-toxic waterproof adhesive. And at their site asknature.org you can search a rich database of case histories. For package designers there are strategies like,

- The puss moth cocoon provides hard, protective casing

- The yellow bush lupine has a valve that regulates water permeability

Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design, has some interesting case histories on naturally inspired design thinking.

And even American Express, at their openforum.com, talks briefly about the increased influence of biomimicry at consumer product companies like Nike, Seventh Heaven and Patagonia.

Bland Equity not Brand Equity

Let’s be honest, things have gotten a bit too simple.

The image at left contains a vodka, a Bluetooth headset, a battery, an auto cleaner, socks, spice jars, olive oil, food take-out containers, shampoo, soup, chocolate, men’s and women’s skin care products, and a beer.

Can you tell which is which? I certainly can’t, and the only thing that might hint at the product type is the package structure.

And I am a huge fan of simple. I would much rather live in Philip Johnson’s Glass House than any of the ornate Macmansions that sit near it along Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan.

But to impose this pared down mid-century design aesthetic (Helvetica was introduced in 1957, just 8 years after the completion of the Glass House) on today’s brand equity and package design may be an inappropriate use of this architectural design aesthetic. And surprisingly much of this work is reminiscent of the quickly abandoned “generic” trend of the 1980s.

Those of us who watch this stuff carefully, have noted the mostly positive turn away from the over-rendered, garish, ostentatious complexity that characterized many consumer product categories in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And I have posted on this subject before.

But the pendulum usually swings too far with most trends, and its time to take an honest look at where the movement toward simplicity has now taken us in the late 2000s.

There are two critical issues with this image that go way beyond simply identifying the content of the package. These issues relate to the two things that consumer product companies often work hardest at and must get right on a package  .  .  building the characteristics of a unique brand and making the shopping experience reasonably painless. Let’s discuss each in the context of design simplification.

The first issue deals with brand equity. And obviously the straightforward and long-term presentation of consistent brand equity on a package is a good thing. But this equity must be, at its minimum, unique and memorable. The qualities of uniqueness and memorability are not something you could accuse any of these products of having.

The second issue deals with simplifying not just the design but also the shopping experience. It’s fair to say that as the similarity of package graphics from SKU to SKU goes up, the ease of shopping for specific flavors or product types, goes down.

The one thing you may have noticed about the products is that they are generally not large consumer product brands. True, but the qualities of uniqueness and memorability are even more important for small brands that are normally unsupported by large amounts of media. In these instances the consumer first encounters the brand on the shelf. So it must make an immediate impression.

Perhaps the only advantage some of these packages would seem to have is the ability to decorate the shelves of upscale boutique retailers. Great for the retailer, and perhaps critical for some small brands in finding any shelf space, but certainly not great for building meaningful, long-term brand equity.

The only impression I get from most of this work is one of homogeneous similarity. This is bland equity not brand equity.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to lovelypackage.com for most of these images.

Tis the season for shopping with smart phones

A technology is really mainstream when it hits USA Today, and on Black Friday no less. So apparently shopping, with your smart phone retail apps blazing, has become a reality.

With the holiday shopping season starting in earnest, and retailers holding their breath, it can now be reported that this is the first season for an app supported retail experience. It appears that over 100 retailers from Best Buy to Toys R Us have all developed mobile web sites, or phone apps, and the article reports that “mobile shopping market is small, even if the sales numbers seem impressive at first blush: $750 million. But that represents about half of 1% of online sales”.

And as I have mentioned in two previous posts this month, here and here, the mobile web site is just the beginning. There will be a whole new level of interactivity between the product, the retailer, and the rest of the consumer’s life when shopping applications like this demo from Resource Interactive become common, I suspect sooner rather than later. The paper also had a related piece on several of the existing mobile shopping sites.

Imagine the possibilites for Christmas 2010.

The Glass Mouse

There is a trend in technology packaging that might be called “The Glass House look”. Hope the architect isn’t displeased.

I live near Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and pass by it often on my training rides through New Canaan. On one such ride this weekend, I stopped and climbed to the top of the high fieldstone wall that lines Ponus Ridge Road to take a peak, and was again reminded of its simple beauty, and the jewel-like quality it gave all of the contents within the glass walls, effortlessly framing and protecting them.

It later occurred to me, as I browsed through an Apple store, that more and more of the computer accessory packaging is beginning to share the same straightforward design philosophy. There is some very simple, clean, elegant technology packaging out there these days.

It seems to be driven by two things. The first of course is Apple. Much has been written about the breathlessly elegant work being done by their in-house design group. I don’t need to add to this dialogue, it speaks for itself.

But the second is the increasingly attractive product design being done by others in the category, and the probable recognition by the package designers that the best design philosophy is the same thing that motivated Philip Johnson in the design of his house, but in reverse.

In his case he spoke about the transparent relationship you have with nature when the lines between the interior and exterior are blurred, when looking out. In the case of technology packaging it is about having nothing between the consumer and the product, when looking in.

But in both cases, the Glass House and the new Apple Mouse box, the intent is the same, a structure that minimizes itself, to maximize its own clarity and transparency. And through this simplicity a way of highlighting both what’s inside and outside the box.

Very few packages, or pieces of architecture for that matter, could do more with less.

Epigenetics of brands

Earlier this week I posted about the new Minute Maid package design, but I’m going to stick with the topic because there are some interesting lessons to be learned here.

Epigenetics refers to changes in appearance or activity of a gene caused by mechanisms other than the underlying DNA. Recently the orange juice business has given us examples of two widely divergent opinions on how to deal with the DNA of a brand.

For a CPG brand, the package is its DNA, containing the basic code of its visual life. The aesthetic building blocks of color, shape, materials, typography, etc. are wound into the strands of its visual heritage. Change any one, and the brand changes, often in radical ways that cannot be predicted.

But biologists have known for some time what marketers and designers, are just beginning to grasp. Their research tells them that even if two individuals have the same DNA, identical twins for instance, the environment can alter the way they look and act. Nature and nurture, right.

Savvy marketers may not have a clear understanding of exactly how the DNA of their brand evolves, but they are beginning to understand that outside influences can have substantial influence on how the genes are expressed. As a result they are more often tinkering with the external factors of advertising, web presence, promotional programs, point of sale material etc., and leaving intact the package, the basic building block of their brand. They are beginning to learn, especially for heritage brands like Minute Maid or Tropicana, with very rich and complex DNA, that it is probably better to rely on these other tools.

Tropicana chose to radically alter the basic building blocks of its brand, changing the DNA itself. Their new design contained almost none of the visual equity it had been known for, and consumers reacted, violently.

With the release this week of its new Minute Maid package design, it is clear that Coke has taken a different approach. Leaving the DNA intact. As Brian Kelley of Coke says in an Ad Age article this week,

“Importantly the Minute Maid logo is clear; it is what links the brand to its terrific heritage. We didn’t stray far from that,” Mr. Kelley said. “Unlike what our competitor did, this is all about improving and moving forward. We certainly weren’t running away from anything.”

As Tropicana learned earlier this year a good way to kill a brand is to radically rearrange its DNA, the package. As Minute Maid has now confirmed a better way to manage the direction of a brand is to leave the DNA essentially intact and use epigenetics, everything other than the package, to influence and adjust the course of the brand.

Absolut supports Vancouver arts community

The Absolut brand has been, virtually from the start, a rare combination of unique and recognizable package, used as an advertising icon, supporting a premium at-home and on-premise visibility, and ultimately making consumers feel part of a lifestyle experience. Not bad for a simple glass bottle. (In the interests of full disclosure, Pernod Ricard is a client, but I don’t work on this brand).

Now we have a new combination of relevant and fresh package design, support of a local illustrator, crowd sourced consumer involvement, and perhaps most importantly, support for community arts programs in Vancouver.

As reported at dexigner.com, Absolut will apparently give up to $120,000 in support of the local arts community from the proceeds of its newly designed Vancouver themed bottle designed by local illustrator and graphic artist Douglas Fraser.

This is the first Canadian city the brand has chosen for its city themed bottles. The other interesting twist as part of this introduction is an arts contest, where Vancouver residents can vote on their favorite community arts proposals.

Here is the link to the contest.

A minute change for Minute Maid

Clean, simple, evolutionary, professional, fruity.

These are the words that come to mind when viewing the new Minute Maid juice packaging announced yesterday by Coke. And maybe it is no surprise that the change is minimal given the Tropicana debacle earlier this year.

The press release certainly doesn’t talk much about the cultural or aesthetic values of the brand. These are Coke’s words when describing the work.

“Based on extensive consumer research, the new visual identity was created to enhance brand preference, improve shelf stand out, drive cost efficiencies and create consistency across a world-leading family of juice brands and products.”

Should we be disappointed that it is an opportunity lost  .  .  .  don’t think so. This was after all not a student design exercise but one step in the life of a very valuable brand. It is a competent evolutionary improvement, and certainly not a flight of ego driven mania and professional incompetence. Don’t get me started with Arnell.

Duffy & Partners was apparently given this chance to update their own work, originally developed in the 1990’s. Here is a link to Joe Duffy describing his earlier effort in the Corporate Design Foundation journal.

While this may not be the kind of work that originally got Joe Duffy noticed, and his firm famously purchased by Michael Peters 20 years ago, with a headline in a Wall Street Journal Ad that read “How two guys with art degrees can do more for your business than a conference room full of MBAs”, it is a different time, revolutionary and breathtaking, no, but competent, yes!

Here is a link to a before and after image on eatmedaily.com

References

Poyner, Rick. 2003. No More Rules, Graphic Design and Postmodernism. New Haven: Yale University Press