Chrysler Bailout Package

It has been announced today that Chrysler will be filing for bankruptcy, and will be doing a deal with Fiat. What a marriage. 

In doing some investigating on this story I happened upon an announcement, reported on motorauthority.com, that Chrysler was introducing a “drag race package” for its Dodge Challenger brand. The piece goes on to say, “Chrysler is set to release a new drag-racing package for its Dodge Challenger muscle car this July, which will be aimed at both professional teams and enthusiasts. The new kit is described as a modern day equivalent of the HemiDart and Barracuda package cars of the late 1960s”. 

This announcement was made last May just a couple months after Fiat introduced their long anticipated update on the Fiat 500 in January 2008.

It will be interesting to see how this couple get along, but I certainly wish them the best.

“Glorified Design Firms”

There was an interesting post recently on cityfile.com.

It wasn’t the post, about Peter Arnell losing a lawsuit with his publisher, which got my attention. It was the first comment posted by Rob Frankel, a man who is not afraid of noting on his site that he has been called “the best branding expert on the planet” by strikingitrich.com  .  .  .  yikes.

In the comment Frankel says “Peter Arnell and agencies like Landor are not branding agencies by any means. They’re glorified design firms”  .  .  .  ouch!

What exactly is a glorified design firm? I don’t know anything about Mr. Frankel, or how he views the role of design firms. But this set me thinking about the current state of the design craft, and its place in the world that has become known as branding.

We have all listened to experts telling us how we must change. How our products must evolve to a service, services to an experience, and experiences to a lifestyle  .  .  .  etc. And it doesn’t seem to matter what business we are talking about, stock brokers have become financial planners, carpenters have become developers, barbers now operate day spas, gas stations are convenience stores, kitchens are now great rooms, Las Vegas has become a family holiday destination, and yes, designers have become brand identity consultants.

My wife and I run a design firm, maybe glorified, maybe not. But in these days of increasing complexity, we try and keep it fairly simple, we do really great package design for some wonderful clients. They’re happy, we’re happy, simple. I guess what got me going about the Frankel comment was that he put Peter Arnell and us in the same boat.

So far I have been fairly gentle with the Arnell/Pepsi situation on this blog, its been way too easy to be critical, fish in a barrel. But let’s be clear. All designers I have spoken to are offended by what Arnell has perpetrated, on his client certainly, but also the stink he has brought to our craft. I suppose this is much the same way that competent financial services professionals feel about being associated with Bernie Madoff, its fraud.

In our industry’s defense, most of us know what we are doing. Yes we understand the basics of typography, color, use of illustration and photography. And if we do package design we have a sense of how the consumer reacts to these stimuli, over time, and in the context of a brand’s history, its specific retail channel, and most importantly of where our client wants to take a brand.

Arnell missed all those signs. To call him a “designer”, glorified or otherwise, would be like calling someone who couldn’t frame a house, a carpenter, or couldn’t cut hair, a barber, or couldn’t draft a will, an attorney. These are the kinds of things they simply know how to do. They are the basic tools of their craft, service, experience, lifestyle.

Grant McCracken, on his blog cultureby, has an interesting take on this issue as well. In a recent post he mentions how Arnell missed badly on his recent Tropicana work.

With all due respect to Mr. Frankel, “Glorified design firms” would never have made those mistakes. 

The Flu and old medicine bottles

The swine flu has gotten a lot of air time in the last few days and it got me wondering about flu and cold remedies which led me to old medicine bottles.

I came upon this group of New Jersey medicine bottles on a site called Cape May County Bottle Collectors. The site does not go into a great deal of detail on their history, but I would guess they were produced in the second half of the 19th century. Doctors and pharmacists would fill them with their proprietary products.

They are refreshingly simple in appearance, mostly clear glass with black typography in a variety of letter forms. They almost seem to be folk art meeting medical commerce in their naive simplicity. I guess that is what efficaciousness looked like 120 years ago.

Cézanne Revisited

I had the wonderful privilege of going through Philadelphia yesterday and having the chance to actually view the show Cézanne and Beyond. It’s just curatorial genius!

As mentioned in an earlier post, the show not only contains more than 50 classic Cézanne works but juxtaposes them against over 100 works of other artists as diverse as Picasso, Kelly, Johns, Marden, and Wall.

This got me thinking that it might be interesting to contrast classic packages and demonstrate their influence on design work that came later. So look for this as a new regular feature of this blog.

We often tend to misunderstand, or at least minimize, the direct influences of previous generations of package design and designers. My feeling though, is that the creative influences of earlier generations of designers is as strong as the influence of Cézanne’s, so ably demonstrated by this exhibition.

Again, go see this show! 

Acknowlegments

All images are from the PMA show, except the Marden which is very close to the one shown in Philly. The left image contrasts Cézanne and Marden, the right image Cézanne and Wall.

Community Supported Design

There is a growing movement, Community Supported Agriculture, to help the locally grown farming industry. How about a grassroots movement to support the local and regional design industry.

This is an image, taken by Keith Lanpher, of the bottled water at the place I am staying. The photograph is great, the water is fine, the label is  .  .  . well. This is more typical of the kinds of amenities packaging you get “off the shelf”  for small local inns and B&Bs.

I wonder if someone could provide a way for small places like this, and it is a wonderful inn/plantation in Virginia, to get access to better ”local” design.

The place is very proud of supporting local farmers, serving locally caught fish, locally butchered beef and lamb, locally produced cheeses, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a mechanism like localharvest.org, that could link them to great local design talent.

Just type in your zip code, like the localharvest.org site allows, and you are linked to local design talent. What a concept.

Hotel Amenities

I am staying in a great historic inn and plantation home in Locust Dale Virginia for a few days, so the posts will be a bit spotty. The only packaging for miles are the little soap and shampoo bottles in the bath. It got me wondering about hotel amenities. When you go out you can’t avoid them, some done well and some not, but they have become ubiquitous.

A quick search turned up one interesting article from the LA Times that mentions products like, Davi Skin, from Carlo Mondavi and partner Josh LeVine, that have been featured in Peninsula Hotels. As you might expect these products are made from byproducts of  ”the sacred winemaking process.” 

When I have a bit more time this area of packaging looks like fertile ground for more investigating.

Dust to Dust

Now isn’t that a beautiful package on the left!

When USA Today features an article about environmental initiatives for consumer product packaging on the cover of their business section, you know we may be headed in the right direction. Or at least that the issues have gotten some traction in the everyday business press.

What got my attention in the article today is that it features some of our larger companies. Frito Lay for instance is planning on introducing a compostable SunChips bag by Earth Day 2010, shown at left. A gimmick of timing perhaps, but I certainly give them credit for the effort.

It also mentions a number of weight/materials reduction efforts by brands like Aquafina and Oscar Mayer. This movement reflects a number of other green programs I have begun to see with our clients as well. When the largest brands in every category are talking about 20%, 30%, or even 40% reductions in plastics used in their packaging, as virtually all companies are trying to do, we are talking about a lot of plastic. Imagine Detroit talking seriously about that kind of increase in vehicle mileage.

The cynics out there would say that this movement is not making a real difference yet or that the pace is too slow, and they are right, but the folks in the conference rooms I visit do take this seriously.

Wal-Mart, yes Wal-Mart, is even beginning to be a major mover in this area. They have a tool, introduced almost 3 years ago, called the “Packaging Scorecard” that ranks the environmental responsiveness of every product sold in the store based on its full life cycle. Their buyers are making purchase and stocking decisions based on this scorecard.

I know I can hear people saying that walking into Wal-Mart is a far cry from walking into an Aveeda store, and again they are right. But making a small change at the world’s largest retailer will have a much bigger impact. As evidence of this initiative I recently received an invite from the Packaging Association of Canada to attend the third Wal-Mart Sustainable Packaging Conference. When they begin to insist that their suppliers change, they do.

My instinct, based on 30 years of listening to clients, suggests that we aren’t going back.  I know we are still in a transition stage, and it is probably a bit like the auto industry relying on hybrids while they figure out economical plugin electric vehicles or fuel cell solutions. But let’s get started! 

Time to increase your spending on brands

The New Yorker magazine has an interesting piece this week about corporate spending on brand advertising and promotional activity during tough economic times, like now. Read it and perhaps you will agree that now is the time to increase, not cut back on, your brand building activities.

The article mentions several examples of brands that have taken different routes, some expanding their spending, some cutting back. The author, James Surowiecki, notes that most brands that came out of hard times strongly, do so after holding or increasing their spending on brand building activities.

He starts with a Kellogg and Post example. During the 1930s Kellogg introduced new products like Rice Krispies, and doubled ad spending. Post cut back on expenses and advertising. The result was that Kellogg’s profits increased 30% by 1933 and became the dominant player in breakfast cereals, where they remain to this day.

Seems to me there is a lesson for everyone here. Anecdotally, I am beginning to hear about a real slowdown in some areas of marketing services, reflecting an overall retrenchment by marketers. I agree with James though. While it may be a tough call to increase your marketing activities while the sky seems to be falling, historically some of the best and most enduring brands have done exactly that.

 

Acknowledgements

The image above is a 1931 ad for Rice Krispies. 

 

The package, a movie on the shelf

A package is a series of sequential events, set in motion by the designer. 

The trick is that unlike the movie director who may have hours, we have to tell the story in only one, almost instantaneous, frame. A package is really one cell in the animated brand image, and is supported by other forms of media and memory that the brand has established.

It struck me while listening, last Thursday, to James Sanders talk about the making of movies in New York like Breakfast At Tiffany’s (see my previous post), that the job of a package designer is very much like that of a movie director. We both deal with a plot (product positioning), cast of characters (product functionality and/or benefits), the audience (the consumer), and of course the theater (the retail outlet).  

Perhaps the biggest difference is the respective heritage, or past life, of the movie and the brand, most movies (except sequels) have none, and most brands have plenty. The director’s job is to invent that heritage and build on it for 90 minutes. The package designer’s job is to build on 90 years of heritage and present it in a single instantaneous frame.

The director is also lucky because although their storyboard renderings are static, the actual movie presents many images over time. Our image is naturally static, and we rely on the emotional content of color, illustration, typography, structure, color, surface texture, etc. to elicit the response a director may build for the length of the movie. 

We deal with time over a much more extended period. Normally reinforcing the past, present and future of the brand we are designing. A movie has no past, although they do rely increasingly on the rich history of moviemaking. They construct the time, place and context of their environment from scratch.

Acknowledgements

The image is the famous movie poster from Breakfast At Tiffany’s at art.com. It was designed by Robert McGinnis. Randy Ludacer, of boxvox.com and Beach Packaging Design was nice enough to set me straight. Honestly the kind of thing I should have known.

AIGA, The corner of Creativity and Main Street

The intersection of fact and film was vividly described at the new AIGA Metro-North chapter launch event last Thursday evening in Stamford CT. It was a big hit and again reminded me of why this organization is so meaningful.

We hosted a talk by the architect James Sanders, who along with Ric Burns, created “New York: A Documentary Film” and who has written a wonderful book about how the city shapes filmmaking called “Celluloid Skyline”.

This AIGA chapter was founded to serve both the geographic needs of those in the northern suburbs of NYC, and perhaps more importantly to serve the wider brand design community, regardless of geographic location. As the invitation to the event said,

“Whether you are a seasoned creative director, experienced design- or brand-manager, up-and-coming practitioner or CEO—we believe you‘ll gain valuable insights through our chapter‘s programming and events. Some (like this first event) will feature visionaries to open up new vistas. Some will tap into design and branding masters for applied insight. Still others will challenge what you may think about brands and how they impact culture and commerce. Through all its content and events, AIGA Metro-North will engage you in ways that will transform how you think about and work with brands.” 

For those who may not be familiar with the mission of the AIGA, it is stated on their wbsite as the following,

“AIGA’s mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool, and vital cultural force. AIGA, the professional association for design, is the premier place for design—to discover it, discuss it, understand it, appreciate it, be inspired by it. It is the place designers turn to first to exchange ideas and information, participate in critical analysis, and research and advance education and ethical practices. AIGA sets the national agenda for the role of design in its economic, social, political, cultural and creative contexts.”

In my view it is the premier organization in which to have the conversation about how the streets of Creativity and Main intersect.