Andy Warhol, Chanel, and Campbell’s Soup

I met Andy Warhol in the dressing room at Paul Stuart on Madison Avenue. I was trying on a suit and he was trying to disappear into the woodwork, while giving a friend some fashion advice as he was having his pants cuffed. Last Sunday was the 22nd anniversary of his death, and knowing Andy as well as I do, its my impression that he would be very interested to see how two of his iconic packages, Chanel No5 and Campell’s Soup, have evolved in the 22 years since his death.

Also last Sunday there was a great piece written by Alice Rawsthorn, in the Spring Fashion issue of The New York Times Style Magazine. Here is the link. She talks about Coco Chanel, the perfume bottle’s introduction in 1921, and the rich history of the brand. It reminded me of how a classic brand can remain fresh in spite of all of the fragrance counter activity in the last several decades. Virtually no change in look while competing in a category that lives on constant innovation and the latest “it” thing.

Now a category not known for constant innovation and the latest “it” thing, is the soup aisle. While the Campbell’s Tomato Soup itself has changed very little in the last few decades, other Campbell’s soup flavors have changed markedly. The cans have become filled with product photography, prominent sub brands, color coding, and your usual over rendered funky logotypes for some of the soup targeted at kids.

My sense is that the amount of change reflected in the two brands has something to do with the positioning of the brands, certainly. But it has more to do with the shopping patterns of the very different retail venues where the products are found.

If you walk into the ground floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, pause for just a second in any aisle, and just listen. The next sound you are likely to hear is the voice of a well trained professional sales person, just aching to get your attention, and bring you up to date on the latest stuff behind their counter. If you stop, virtually all of them are intimately aware of the products, their use, and how they might be just right for you. In two words this is called, personal service. This has been the retail model for Saks since it was founded by Horace Saks in 1924, and it hasn’t changed much in the last 85 years. 

When was the last time you got personal service in the soup aisle. What Campbell’s began to realize was that this aisle is always self-shopped, and their customers are typically in a hurry, distracted, and were having a tough time reading the labels for any number of reasons. This meant time waisted, or mistakes made, finding the flavor. So now we have a few icon flavors like tomato that have remained classic, while most cans in their new display have clear signals to help the consumer. I’m not sure what this will do to long-term brand equity, but my suspicion is the folks at Campbell’s have their eye on this.

So you have two classic packages, both dating from the early decades of the twentieth century. A time when both the department store and food store offered personal service. Chanel is a brand sold primarily in the department store, a retail model that hasn’t changed much in the last century. Campbell’s is a brand that was designed in a time when you knew your grocer, and he personally helped you fill each bag. Times have changed in food store retailing and Campbell’s has had to adapt, even if Andy would be disappointed.

References

Rawsthorn, Alice. 2009. Message in a Bottle. The New York Times. Spring Fashion Magazine 

For more articles by Alice Rawsthorn, click here.

Images. Copyright 2009 – The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Resource, Solomon Fine Art

Trix are for Kids, and Photoshop and Illustrator

That bunny on the right sure looks like he is maxed out on his credit cards doesn’t he? He is one revved up rabbit? Lets talk about that.

At TheDieline.com earlier this week there was an interesting post, found here, mentioning the fact that General Mills is bringing back retro cereal boxes at some retailers. The contrast between the old and new Trix boxes struck a couple cords. One about design, one about life. 

In January of 1984, on the Monday morning after the now famous Super Bowl commercial I went to the only Apple retailer in Manhattan and bought my first Macintosh. He had two in stock. One on the sales floor, the other he sold to me. I still have that crazy machine. Imagine the operating system, software, and files all on single sided 400k floppy disks, no internal hard drive, impossible!

I still vividly remember the first time I took a mouse in my hand and drew a simple oval in MacDraw, the world shook. I think I was New York Macintosh Users Group member number 34. So nobody can claim to be a bigger fan of technology and its influence on design. But I have watched, in the intervening 25 years, the work the design community has been creating, and have been increasingly concerned. We seem to be doing stuff, using the computer as the enabler, simply because we can.  

Things have gotten extraordinarily complex. Look at that Trix logo, layers, outlines, blends, drop shadows, more blends, glows and all kinds of wacky photography manipulation for the cereal. Our friendly, care-free roller skating bunny has morphed into a maniacal character who certainly has had too many lattes with his Trix in the morning. There are beginning to be hints of a backlash. The renewed interest in design simplification, in packaging yes but also in many other venues, seems to be one manifestation of a larger trend towards simplifying one’s life.

Robert Plant won his recent Grammy not for the overpowering Led Zeppelin sound, but for a quiet bluegrass inspired album with Allison Krauss. People seem to be yearning for a simple fixed rate mortgage from a real hometown banker, not some online huckster of financial products, devising a no money down scheme packaged and sold to a foreign investor. February designer melons from Chile, shipped overnight on FedEx planes, are giving way to ownership of shares in a local vegetable farm.

The enabling tools for us as designers are Photoshop and Illustrator. The enabling tools of our lives have become the ATM, the credit card, and the second mortgage. We have created things simply because we could. Lets step back and see if we are really any better bringing this new level of complexity to our work and our lives. Don’t know about you, but I’d rather be the bunny on the left.

Acknowledgements

The image of the Trix boxes comes from TheDieline.com

Costco and the food equivalent of the Hummer and the Prius

I’m just getting started on this blog thing, so go with me here. Some of my posts will simply be fun and somewhat impromptu impressions.

Was reminded again on Sunday of what a great place Costco is. Amazing variety. How many stores let you to leave with a bag of Scott’s Turf Builder, a bunch of socks, some salad dressing, snow tires, and a hot roast chicken all in the same cart. Its also an unrivaled place to watch people and the way they interact with products and packaging, as well as a place to do mandatory homework. For those of us in the package design industry, Costco and the other warehouse stores like it, have become most of our client’s second largest customer. Number one goes without saying.  

I was wandering down one aisle near the back when two very different products caught my eye. The only thing they shared beyond proximity was the letter U in their names. Also the typographer in me couldn’t help but notice they shared a similarity in the look of the hand lettered font for the two logos on the front panels. Perhaps Mr. Landor and Mr. Rand might think that the term logo is a bit of an exaggeration in this case. 

They were right across the aisle from one another and yet couldn’t be more different. A 32 ounce plastic barrel of Utz Cheese Balls, a decadently great combination of corn meal, vegetable oil and whey, and Kashi U, a whole grain breakfast cereal in a kraft board box printed by a company that “offsets its electricity use with non-polluting windpower.”

This was truly the food equivalent of the Hummer and the Prius side by side on the shelf. You decide, what a country!

Tropicana, a case for open source marketing

It would be so great to have free and unfettered, yes open source, access to exactly what really happened with Tropicana. We could all benefit by not making the kinds of mistakes that were obviously made here. As I said yesterday, its official, the new Tropicana packaging will be taken off the shelf. Why you ask? In my view is the answer is simple, a toxic combination of hubris, cultural naivete, and incompetence.

This was caused I suspect by Peter Arnell, Neil Campbell and all other senior decision makers at Pepsico (except the professionals in their creative services group who were, in all likelihood, kept totally out of the loop on this one) assuming that the Tropicana brand belonged to them, not the consumers. They couldn’t have been listening. Again why? 

According to Neil Campbell, President of Tropicana North America, in an article in Monday’s New York Times, they found out that some buyers are actually passionate about packaging. What were they thinking? 

In Peter Arnell’s case the answer seems simple, a long history of ego blinded by hubris. Its my brand, the client has given it to me, and I’ll do what I want with it. In the case of Pepsi marketing management, they were clearly tone deaf, gullible, and culturally insensitive to the strong brand history. Something I called, in my column yesterday, the “living history” of Tropicana.

But there is a third culprit, and one that now may be the most culpable, and one that has not been mentioned in virtually any of the press I have read, the research agency. Don’t know who they are or the methodology they used. Either Pepsi used the wrong research tools or they weren’t listening to the answers. No competent market research firm would have allowed Pepsi, or even Peter Arnell, to stray so far from the heritage of the brand. If the research was done correctly, the signs would have been obvious. 

The Times article quotes Campbell as saying last month, “The straw and orange have been there for a long time, but people have not necessarily had a huge connection to them”  .  .  .  then last Friday, “What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”

Packaging is a hard thing to research, and no fault of theirs, consumers aren’t comfortable, let alone eloquent, talking about aesthetic issues in lucid ways. Which means that everyone needs to listen very carefully, and good professionals know how. I’ve seen it happen first hand on heritage brands like Arm & Hammer and Duracell. Its amazing how clear the signals can be with well designed research. But designers can’t be blinded by ego, marketers shouldn’t assume they understand everything about the cultural heritage of their brand, and perhaps most importantly in this case, research agencies need to continue building better methodologies for getting at the “living history” of the brand. 

Campbell ended the interview saying, “I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.” Yes but your research agency needs to know how to get them making the right kind of noises.

I am left with more questions than answers at this point. Yes we know the design didn’t work, but why was it led so astray? Wouldn’t it be great if Pepsi would share the step by step methodology that led to this fiasco. Open source marketing, we could all learn from that.

The new Tropicana packaging is gone.

So its official, something I had learned last Friday from a well placed friend, but thought was too good to be true at the time.

The New York Times reported today that the new Tropicana packaging will be taken off the shelf, ASAP. Why you ask? In my view the answer is simple, a toxic combination of hubris by the design firm, cultural naivete by the marketers, and incompetence by the research agency. 

More on this tomorrow. I need a day to reflect.

The Package is a Marriage

David Brooks had a great column last Friday in The New York Times on the stimulus package. Not the kind of package I’m used to designing, but in the article he used an analogy that has interesting applications in my world of package design. As he said,

“Psychologists have a saying that when a couple comes in for marriage therapy, there are three patients in the room — the husband, the wife and the marriage itself. The marriage is the living history of all the things that have happened between husband and wife. Once the patterns are set, the marriage itself begins to shape their individual behavior. Though it exists in the space between them, it has an influence all its own.”  

A package obviously exists in the space between the product and consumer, and certainly has a strong influence in shaping the relationship between the two. In fact, I would argue it is the single most important long-term influence over the relationship. Advertising campaigns change, promotional programs adjust, POS programs come and go, but no other vehicle of brand identity has such a long term influence.

But the most intriguing thought in that quote is the idea of living history. A package is indeed living history. Tiffany certainly thinks its blue box is living history, Coke’s bottle with the script letter form is damn good living history, the Campbell’s Soup can, the Hershey bar, the Absolute bottle, a box of Tide, you get my point. All are icons that represent not just the living history of a brand but the marriage between the consumer and a product.

I think it was Duffy Design that once spoke eloquently on their web site about the firm, and the work they do, trying to influence and shape that moment of space between the product and the user.   

At the risk of pushing the analogy too far, good designers are great therapists. They get to know the partners, they review the history of the relationship, help set future goals, and make very specific, sensitive recommendations on how adjustments to the marriage can help shape the relationship. I know, I know, I may have pushed it too far, but the next time someone suggests radical change to your package, be careful, and think of living history and the little blue box.

Acknowledgments

This image is copyrighted and from the Tiffany web site

Producing 4 Pounds of Juice Releases 3.75 Pounds of Carbon

This is not about design, this is about the environment. I don’t need to add any of my own carbon emissions to the atmosphere by fuming about the new design of the Tropicana juice package. As I said earlier this week about the Pepsi redesign, time will tell, and consumers will speak for themselves.

Apparently Tropicana has become the first U.S. brand to be Carbon Trust certified. This has been widely reported recently including in Packaging World’s eClip newsletter yesterday. I realize that this is my second post about Pepsico products this week, but I sincerely applaud the effort to begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the company. Working with The Earth Institute at Columbia University (www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu), PepsiCo calculated the life-cycle carbon footprint of its 64-oz container of Tropicana using the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 2050 guidelines.  

Indra K. Nooyi, chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo was quoted as saying, “PepsiCo’s partnership with the Carbon Trust is a significant step in our environmental sustainability journey. As part of our company-wide ‘Performance with Purpose’ initiative, we are committed to reducing our overall environmental impact. Understanding what contributes to the carbon footprint of our products is critical both to achieving our sustainability commitments and to driving efficiency gains across our global business.”

The really shocking thing about this article was the conclusion. Using the Carbon Trust process of measuring life cycle data, mapping the product life cycle, from growing and squeezing the oranges and getting the container on the shelves, to finally disposing of or recycling the packaging, the estimated carbon footprint for the 64-oz carton of Tropicana is 1.7 kilograms. That is essentially equal to the weight of the juice in the package! 

The only good news for package designers is that apparently the package itself only accounted for 15% of the carbon emissions. Still seems like a lot of carbon. Makes you wonder what the carbon foot print of bottled water might be versus drinking tap. 

Acknowledgments

This data was reported in yesterday’s Packaging World eClip Newsletter, http://www.packworld.com/newsletters/ec-02-19-09.html.

Moral Hazard

Risk is an interesting concept when applied to design, and Johnson & Johnson has been doing some very risky things recently, as this KY project illustrates. Is this project a confirmation of the laws of moral hazard or a fluke? The traditional definition of moral hazard would suggest that this company, and Chris Hacker’s group in the global strategic design office, should not be willing to take these kinds of risks. The risks of failing within a major corporation are so large, that they should only be producing safe work that reduces the companies exposure. Yet the work of large corporations suggest no specific pattern. Most large corporations are accused of being risk averse, selecting safe design, but many are not.

I have lived in a Connecticut suburb of New York for over 20 years, and  a very high percentage of my neighbors are, or unfortunately were, in the financial services industry. So needless to say the economy has always been a topic of conversation. But I must admit, that although the concept of moral hazard may have been something my neighbors learned in business school, the phrase has been around at least since the 1600s, I did not become familiar with the term until Lehman Brothers went under last Fall.

Wikipedia defines Moral Hazard as “the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk.” This got me thinking, and I admit that when you get a designer thinking about the definitions of financial risk usually associated with governments and central banks that things might stray from the traditional definitions, but hear me out.

Can you make any correlation between the design work developed by clients that are exposed to a lot of personal risk in selecting a design, say an entrepreneur running a start-up venture, versus a marketer at a large global corporation who would appear to have much less personal exposure to risk? Or does the size of a brand within the portfolio have anything to do with the size of the risk a company is willing to take? Obviously KY is a much smaller brand than Band Aid. Another paradox of large or small is that most design managers for large corporations probably feel less personal job risk, although that is debatable in today’s economy, than the entrepreneur at a start up company.

The normal definitions of risk exposure would seem to suggest that entrepreneurs, who want to reduce their personal exposure to risk would be LESS likely to select risky design work. Design managers at large corporations, who are at less personal risk in their positions would be MORE comfortable selecting risky design work.

History, or at least the clichés of history, would suggest the opposite. Traditionally large consumer goods companies are accused of taking virtually no risk in design development. While small entrepreneurial companies are thought to be the breeding ground of new design thinking.

Any number of recent examples suggest that there may be no correlation between the size of the organization, the lack of personal risk in a design managers position, and the “riskiness” of the work they develop. Take Apple and Microsoft. Both companies started very small, by young entrepreneurs from atypical backgrounds, in a similar industry, at about the same time, yet their design heritages suggest two companies that have taken very different paths, and very different risk profiles in their design identities. Steve Jobs has been the poster child of design innovation and Bill Gates of conformity. Neither company or individual would seem to have had significantly different exposure to risk.

It would seem that perhaps the rules of moral hazard do often apply in the design world, companies exposed to big risks, and the people who work for them, often make safe design decisions. But my quick look at this would suggest that their are both timid clients and brave clients, willing to expose themselves to significant risk at both large and small companies, and even companies at very different life cycles of their growth.

Acknowledgments

Shown is an image from the Johnson & Johnson KY website.

Alexander The Great, Aunt Jemima, Paul Newman, and Giada

A seal of Alexander The Great from 325BC

The Aunt Jemima trademark

Newman’s Classic Salsa

The cover of Giada’s new book

An ancient conquerer of the entire “known world” looking for a way to certify authenticity, an african american slave born in 1834 in Montgomery County Kentucky, one of the most renowned character actors of the 20th century, and the Food Channel celebrity granddaughter of an Italian movie producer. All four share the fact that their images have been shown on, and their reputations have been used to certify the quality of, goods and services. But that’s where the similarity ends. They are of clearly different generations and it is interesting to consider how their brands have grown over time.

I recently came across Giada De Laurentiis’ new book, Giada’s Kitchen: New Italian Favorites, and it got me thinking about the role of celebrity and its use on packages. How did it start, how has it evolved, and where is it going? 

It certainly goes as far back as Alexander’s use of Seals with his image around 340BC, and there is evidence of this practice on the Cyclades in the 7th century BC. As Martin Henig notes in The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, “Their primary purpose was to secure valuable commodities with the mark of ownership or to guarantee the authority of a letter or contract.” Sound familiar? 

Aunt Jemima’s character, who many think was one of the first used to endorse a product in North America, was invented by two entrepreneurs, Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood of the Pearl River Milling Company. Nancy Green, born in slavery, began representing Aunt Jemima and demonstrating the company’s new self-rising flour at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In her own way she conquered the world, sold over 50,000 orders, was given a lifetime contract, and toured all over the country. 

In 1926, the year after Paul Newman was born, the Aunt Jemima trademark was purchased by The Quaker Oats Company. We all know the story of his magnificent life and career. Charity is of course what separates the use of his image from the others. Over $250 million have been raised by Newman’s Own using his endearing image.

Which brings us to Giada. A child of celebrity, hyped by a cable channel driven by the popularity of celebrity chefs, and trying to sell anything she and her licensing partners think she can hype, sorry I’ll stop. I will admit the book has a great recipe for wheat linguine with green beans, ricotta and lemon.

It will be interesting to see how the use of celebrity endorsements develops from here. and who will be remembered in another 2,350 years.

References

Clark Hine, Darlene. 1993. Black Women in America: An Historical Perspective

Henig, Martin and Guy Wilson, Nigel. 2006. Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece

Pepsi financial results tied to redesign effort

I will spare you my thoughts, for now, about the ongoing Pepsico packaging redesign initiative. Lets forget aesthetics for a moment, and note that apparently the redesign has begun to get the attention of the financial community. Last Friday, the 13th, Pepsico announced earnings, and it was hard to avoid the suspicion that things are going south. They announced the first category decline in North American beverage sales in half a century. Now whether the consumer is really beginning to be negatively influenced by the new design work, or as noted by Indra Nooyi this is simply “some disruption in the system”, or just reflects the consumer tightening their belt in this economy, is clearly too early to tell. But stay tuned, the consumer will make a decision about this work, and it will not be ambiguous.

Here are some excerpts from the quarterly conference call with analysts and reactions from the business press.

Indra Nooyi said in her conference call, “The piece of the portfolio that didn’t perform up to expectations was our North American beverage business which continued to be buffeted by the category dynamics. As you know this was an unprecedented year for the LRB category in North America with the first decline in category volume in at least the last half century. Clearly this remains our key area of focus.”

She went on to note, “when you are refreshing 1200 SKUs you are going to have some disruption in the system because people hold off ordering waiting for the new products to come in.”

Massimo D’Amore, CEO of Pepsico Americas continued, “As you know by middle of 2008 we put in place a plan to completely refresh and rejuvenate our entire North America beverage lines, from our brand identities to consumer campaigns to innovation. And most of these initiatives are now appearing in the marketplace. We expect that during the course of the new beverage lineup will gain traction and our supporting campaigns will yield increasing results. The first half of the year will still be a work in process but we believe our investment will yield the results later in 2009.”

Vinnee Tong, AP Business Writer notes ”PepsiCo Americas Beverages posted a 10 percent sales decline as the North American soft drink industry saw its first year-over year sales decline. PepsiCo has launched a new marketing campaign to bring consumers back to soft drinks such as signature Pepsi, Sierra Mist and Mountain Dew. The promotional push includes a new Pepsi logo”

William Spain of MarketWatch reported ”In beverages, volume was off 6%, as business showed a 10% decline in revenue and a 16% drop in core operating profit.”

Say what you will about the new design effort, and many have, the consumer will be the ultimate judge. It will be interesting to watch this play out in the next year.