Research in the round

Package design research continues to be a bit complicated, and I am not sure it has gotten any less so in the last few years, but there is some interesting technology, both high and low, being introduced that takes research beyond the dreaded focus group room or the sterility of the eye tracking lab.

My last post described the more flexible and more organic retail spaces that are beginning to evolve as a result of both the retailer’s quest for innovation and the consumer’s interest in a less formal and less structured shopping experience. This got me wondering how the traditional tools of package design research might be dealing with this less predictable environment.

This is important because the final decisions about the success or failure of a package are made by the consumer at the shelf, and many of the existing research tools were developed in a time when the venue for this decision was straight rows of horizontal shelves, lined up in a straight aisle, organized in a rigid grid to maximize space utilization.

Research tools have typically dealt with a flat 2-dimensional field of view that was common with these straight rows of shelves. If the retail stores are changing is the research industry finding ways to accommodate and measure response in an increasingly complex environment? A quick survey seems to indicate that the answer is maybe.

One example of a hi-tech approach is the Kimberly Clark facility they call their Innovation Design Studio. It is apparently a virtual reality center that has the capability of creating full-sized replicas of retail spaces. Consumers can view mock shelves and actually feel as if they have become part of the virtual retail environments, and make purchase decisions within this virtual world. Sounds interesting, and intuitively seems better than a static conference room or research lab, and certainly can be tailored to simulate the new more organic retail spaces, but I have no first hand experience with this type of facility, so its hard to judge how virtual the results might be.

A low-tech approach is a represented by a client facility I have visited. The client will remain nameless, but like Kimberly Clark it is a major global consumer products company. The research facility is housed in an unidentified building, in a nondescript office/industrial complex, outside a medium sized city. As you walk into the building your first impression is of a completely stocked, rather large food store, housed completely within a warehouse-like space. Nothing virtual about it.

Every move of the consumers who enter is followed both live through mirrored windows above the aisles or through cameras located in key locations throughout the facility. I was darned impressed and think the results the client was able to achieve were measurably better than other more limited facilities I have seen.

And what I like most is that while this is clearly a simulated shopping experience, the consumer is viewing real 3-D package comps, on a real shelf, in a close to real shopping environment. An environment that can be built to accommodate almost any new layout approach envisioned by retail store planners.

In this context the virtual route seems, obviously, a bit removed from reality. Consumers are in a virtual space, viewing virtual shelf sets of virtual packages, and making virtual decisions.

It would be interesting to know how the overall cost of these two facilities compares. Certainly both are significant investments. All things being equal I would vote for the near real store vs. the virtual simulation.

References

A few links to info on the Kimberly Clark Facility can be found here, and here, and here.

Manhattan, and the new retail store, both off the grid

The design of Manhattan and the traditional retail store layout share a similar approach, implemented in the 19th century, and based on the grid. This rigid architecture, and its obvious efficiency that has worked well in the past, seems to be under review by city planners as well as retail store designers.

Experiments on the streets of New York and in the aisles of Stop & Shop are creating environments that are more casual, perhaps more democratic and certainly more interactive. In both cases the planners are responding to an interest in making their spaces more humane, and more enjoyable for the casual pedestrian to stroll, to relax, and shop.  

Look at the street map of Manhattan at left. It looks a lot like the traditional grid structure of most Wal-Mart stores. Notice the casual line that snakes from the upper left to lower right, that’s Broadway, mid-town Manhattan’s only concession to informality. These same kinds of informal swathes are being experimented with by most retail planners.

New York’s new transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, has a grand plan to make Broadway a series of pedestrian plazas and bike paths, inspired by what has happened in Copenhagen in the last decade. An architectural review of this effort, by Nicolai Ouroussoff, is in the New York Times today.

I see a lot of similarity between the experiments of city planners and the efforts of retailers to make their spaces more humane, and to borrow a technology term, more user-friendly. Most retail stores are experimenting with ways of making the shopping experience more personal and less programmed, planning spaces that allow shoppers to wander in ways that their interests of the moment and personal shopping lists take them.

In fact I wonder if the lessons learned about the way we use the internet is influencing any of these decisions. It will be interesting to see if the way we use, and personalize, the web and other forms of communication influence other areas of our lives. These two examples may be the first of many instances where rigid social structures are giving way to more informal user-directed environments.

Acknowledgements

The Times Square photo above is by Damon Winter for the New York Times

ICFF, Ellen Lupton, brand loyalty, and ModKat

In continuing to read coverage of the ICFF in New York this week I happened upon the New York Times column on the Fair, in which the columnist Penelope Green essentially followed Ellen Lupton, the curator of contemporary design at The Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum, as she browsed through the show.

This post wanders around a bit as well, but the article got my immediate attention when it began with Ellen noting that “The relationship between you and your furniture is not a one-night stand  .  .  . Sometimes it lasts a lifetime.”

Hmmm, the same can be said for our favorite brands. Those that have followed this blog, know how we feel about package design and its role in brand equity for the long haul. It is certainly not a one night stand.

She went on to say “ home life is rarely just sunshine and freshly made heirloom beds. It can be dark and complicated. People kill each other, they have affairs. they steal each other’s money. Domestic life is hard.” Again I wondered about the comforting role of the lifelong relationship we all build with the brands we love. Does this continue to give us comfort in uncertain economic times?

I also wondered about brand loyalty and the switching, or not, that might take place during various types of economic cycles. There is significant anecdotal evidence that suggest consumers who establish relationships with brands during tough times keep those relationships for a long time. 

According to Wayne Hurlbut in a recent article atsmallbusinessnewz.com,”Depression survivors were very loyal to certain businesses and reliable products that delivered on their brand promise. There was no margin for error, as a bad brand represented a major cash loss. It became a commonplace for those who lived through the Great Depression, to retain loyalty for their entire lives, to brands that kept their word on quality and reliability.”

Finally, as Ellen continued to wander through the show she came across a fascinating product called ModKat, a kitty litter box unlike any I have seen. In fact their website says they were given the ICFF Editor’s Award for the Best Accessory. Folks at the show obviously thought they were on to something. As they say, it looks like a great little private area for your feline friend to do their business.

Designs for a dollar

The 2009 International Contemporary Furniture Fair took place this week in New York.

One of the exhibits at the ICFF was a design schools exhibition, and the students at Pratt had an interesting group of entries. The premise of their show was to see if they could design something that could be produced for a buck.

FastCompany.com has a slideshow of some of this work, and most are intriguing combinations of found objects, cheap everyday materials in unexpected combinations, like the repurposed apple juice bottle shown here.

Coke’s PlantBottle, by any other name . . .

Coca Cola announced late last week that they will be introducing a “new plastic bottle made partially from plants.” A super idea but that name  .  .  .  ouch.

The recyclable/renewable aspects aside, and I sincerely applaud Coke for the effort, how do you feel about drinking vitaminwater out of a PlantBottle?

As Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company says in the press release,  ”It builds on our legacy of environmental ingenuity and sets the course for us to realize our vision to eventually introduce bottles made with materials that are 100 percent recyclable and renewable.”

Never mind the name, the really good news is that the bottle is apparently made from 30% plant based material, and it can be processed in traditional PET recycling facilities. The life-cycle analysis done by Imperial College London indicates that it reduces carbon emissions by 25 percent.  

Given Coke’s volume that’s a lot of carbon. By one estimate in 2000 by Dr. Bill Sheehan, network coordinator for the GrassRoots Recycling Network, ”Coke produced more than 21 billion plastic bottles” between 1995 and 2000.

The plan, like that announced in late April by Frito Lay with their biodegradable snack chip bags, is to phase this bottle in gradually during the next couple years, with Dasani and vitaminwater being the first brands to use the new bottle.

Now this is a Coke and Pepsi war we all benefit from! 

Acknowledgements

The illustration above is by Stephanie Carter from veer.com

The Dipylon Wine Jug, the first package with a message

While reading Sailing The Wine Dark Sea this weekend, Thomas Cahill’s survey on the historical context of Greek life and culture, I came upon a reference to what many scholars consider the earliest surviving example of the Greek alphabet.

Although Cahill is not specific, subsequent research suggested that he must have been referring to an inscription on a wine jug found in the Dipylon Cemetery, near the Dipylon Gate in the Kerameikos area of Athens. The jug is attributed to the Late Geometrical Period (750-700 BCE), and it has been dated to ca. 740 BCE. It is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

What got me excited was that this sounded like the first use of packaging not just to protect, but also to enhance the entertainment value and usage occasion of the contents. And as you will read this is a wonderful combination of linguistic history, wine lore, and graphic design.  

What got Cahill excited about the jug is the fact that what written language had previously existed, had been used most often for rather mundane purposes, as he says in the book,

“Almost as interesting as the invention itself are the uses to which the Greeks swiftly put their writing. If the pictographic systems, in their early incarnations, served simply as accountant’s tools and if the Semitic consonant alphabets were, to begin with, employed to similar purposes – or, in the Sinai, used perhaps to record short prayers – the Greek alphabet, from the first, takes off in a delightfully unserious direction. The earliest inscription we have is scratched on an Athenian wine jug of Homer’s time proclaiming playfully that:

The dancer of consummate grace,
will take this vase as his prize.”

He then goes on to describe what many think is the other very early example of the Greek alphabet, from the Nestor’s Cup, excavated in graves dating from the time of the Trojan War, by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 at Mycenae.

“Not a glint of the green eyeshade of the accountant or a hint of the furrowed brow of the believer. And even when god is mentioned, as in the three lines of verse inscribed on a drinking cup almost as old as the Athenian jug .  .  . we could hardly ascribe high seriousness to the poet:

Who am I? None other than the luscious
drinking cup of Nestor. Drink me quickly –
and be seized in lust by golden Aphrodite.     

I haven’t seen a bottle of 21^st century wine that says it better.

Hubble and The Guggenheim, two great packages

The juxtaposition of these two images got me thinking.

Today there are a couple of completely unrelated events happening, one in space and one on Fifth Avenue. And admittedly I may be stretching the definition of packaging when discussing these events but so be it. 

The Hubble Space Telescope, being repaired by a couple of space walking NASA astronauts as this post is being written, has been making staggering contributions to science and our imagination for nearly 20 years. The Guggenheim Museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary with the opening today of a show on its architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 

So we have Hubble, a package designed to look outward and discover distant worlds, and the Guggenheim Museum a package designed to enter and discover the artistic universe within.

PET, a greener spirits package

PET plastic bottles, even the 100% post consumer recycled variety, are being considered more seriously by alcoholic beverage companies. They have a number of advantages.

Cost is the most obvious. But there also seem to be other advantages when looking at the full life cycle of the bottles. I was speaking with a packaging professional in the spirits industry last week and he mentioned doing an analysis of the life cycle implications of glass vs plastic bottles for one of their brands.

They figured there would be a very significant reduction in the number of truckloads of bottles into the bottling location if they switched from glass to plastic. The number would go from 1,266 truckloads per year for glass down to 719 truckloads for PET plastic. That’s a reduction of 547 truckloads, or 43% a year (that’s over two truckloads every business day) from their bottle manufacturer to the plant, and that’s only for one of their brands, and for only one part of the production, distribution, retail chain!

Now you may be thinking of just the carbon footprint reduction, but he also suggested that the cost savings, again just on this one brand, could be several million dollars a year, that’s a lot of carbon. Can you imagine the implications for the entire industry.

But I am a designer, and I know there has been a real consumer reluctance to accept spirits packaged in anything but glass, especially premium spirits, which is where much of the new product activity is these days.

It will be interesting to see if the general increase in the use of recyclable plastic containers eventually translates into an increased consumer acceptance of PET plastic for premium spirits. My hunch is, that in spite of the environmental advantages, it may take a while.

Acknowledgments

The photo above shows McCormick Distilling’s eco friendly 360 vodka in a 100% PCR PET 50 ml bottle. This was featured in a recent post on greenerpackage.com

Coke, Budweiser and brand heritage

This image, which contrasts packages from the early 20th and early 21st centuries, clearly shows how far Coke and Budweiser have evolved the package design of their core brands in essentially the last 100 years. As you can see, Budweiser not so much, Coke a fair bit. It is fascinating to observe the obvious similarities of these images, but it is the differences, and how they evolved, that are the most interesting to discuss.

I talked about package design innovation last week to a group of marketing and packaging executives. In discussing innovation it is always worth looking back for some historic analogies and I chose to demonstrate the change that has, or hasn’t, taken place with several major brands including Coke and Budweiser.

Let’s start with why this matters, beyond being an interesting design exercise. In two words, market capitalization. As the Interbrand 2008 rating of brand value suggests, these brands are very valuable. And if these numbers have any truth to them, and I know some in our industry say they don’t, these brands also represent a very significant portion of their company’s value.  

Anheuser Busch’s purchase price in July of 2008 was about $52 billion, and Interbrand says the value of its Budweiser brand last year stood at $11.5 billion, or about a bit more than 20% of the market value of the whole company.

The Coca Cola figures are even more interesting. Coke’s brand value is estimated to be $66.6 billion while the current market cap of the whole company now stands at about $102 billion. Meaning the brand value is essentially 2/3rds of the market cap of the entire company. That’s a lot of value!

Which brings us to the design of their icon packages.

Obviously the Bud package has essentially remained the same, both from a structural standpoint with the 12-Ounce long neck bottle shape, and the graphics standpoint, with elements that stem from traditional 19th century design complexity.

Yet three changes are evident, the color of the glass, the size and weight of the brand logotype, and the incorporation of a larger label size with more red color equity. The thinking must be something like this. Let’s not mess with our core brand in a category that thrives on heritage. Let our other products like Bud Light fool around with change. The Clydesdales need to be comfortable hauling this stuff around, don’t mess with those big guys.

Now the Coke package is a bit more interesting because the amount of change has been so significant yet controlled. Soft drinks are after all very different from beer. Change is mandatory, yet Coke has done a really great job of modulating their message between heritage, trust and the need to stay current. With the new package they have chosen to use a state of the art aluminum bottle but to retain the iconic hobble skirt shape. The contemporary tone comes from the simple trick of scale, blowing up the script letterform and wrapping it around the bottle. There is still instant recognition even at this scale. You know you have reached icon status when you trust that even if a consumer sees only 20% of your logotype, and really any 20%, they will still recognize your brand across the aisle.

Finally of course, the red color has become an icon of each brand, and it is interesting to see how the two beverages have approached the use of the color red on the package. For Budweiser, like most things they do, it is a story of gradualism. Modestly increasing the use of the color over time. For Coke, on this package at least, it has become the fundamental brand anchor that frames one of the most memorable pieces of typography in the world. And it is this bold, simple, direct red and white communication, at once so 19th century and yet so clearly 21st century, that is the strength of this most recent package.

Package Design, a leading or trailing indicator, 1930-1940

This is the fourth in our series of short pieces on highlights in the package design history of the 20th century, decade by decade.

The 1930s can’t be written about without the immediate acknowledgment that the biggest economic and social event of the time was the great depression, with average incomes down 40%, from $2,300 to $1,500, between 1929 and 1932. It had an obvious impact on all cultural and commercial institutions of the time, and its influence on design is unquestioned.

One of the most direct influences on design was the employment of artists and designers by the WPA. It was estimated that over 5,000 artists were employed by the WPA Federal Artists Project making between $23 and $35 a week. And some of this work is shown above from a Broward County Florida Museum’s online exhibit on New Deal jobs creation programs. This is wonderful stuff and continues to have obvious influences on contemporary designers like Michael Schwab.

In spite of the economic hardships, or perhaps because of them, the decade was also a surprisingly vibrant time for the arts, architecture and design. Some notable events in architecture included the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930 and Empire State building in 1931, while in 1935 Wright began to design Falling Water and it is completed in 1937. The opening of The Museum of Modern Art in New York occurred in 1939. In interiors, 1933 marks the year Herman Miller exhibited its first Gilbert Rohde collection at the Chicago World’s Fair, Century of Progress Exposition, and in 1938 Hans Knoll arrives in US, and starts a furniture company in a single room on 72nd Street in NYC.

There were notable commercial achievements as well. In 1930 RCA Victor introduced the first LP vinyl record, in 1938 the first TV broadcasting started and the first televised baseball game was aired between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1939, and 1939 also marked the release of Gone with The Wind and Wizard of Oz.

Three events in the decade conspired to produce some interesting packaging, the repeal of prohibition, the growth of the electric washing machine, and the hiring of Alex Steinweiss by Columbia records.  

The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 as one of the most significant acts early in Roosevelt’s first term and canning of beer was soon started for the first time. The official birthday of the beer can is January 24, 1935. That’s the day cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale first went on sale in Richmond, VA. This can is shown with a number of other fascinating cans from the period. These images are from breweriana.com. It is interesting to see the much more modern approach to graphics taken by the brewers on this package structure, very different than the graphics on most beer bottle labels of the time. It is almost as if they felt that a revolutionary structure required revolutionary graphics.

Sales of electric washing machines reached nearly 1 million units by the late 20s and the first public laundromat opened in Ft Worth in 1934. Laundry detergent packaging was beginning to reflect the simple basic hard-hitting look that would dominate the detergent category for the next 75 years. You can make the case that it has been only in the last several years that consumer products companies have begun to change this approach. The packaging shown here includes the original 1933 Dreft box, the first synthetic laundry detergent.

In 1939, Columbia Records hired Alex Steinweiss, an AIGA medalist, as its first art director. The announcement of a 2007 retrospective of his work at the Robert Berman Gallery said this about his contribution,

“In 1939, a 23 year old graphic designer revolutionized the music industry.  No longer would records come in plain brown wrappers.  As Art Director at Columbia Records, Steinweiss created the ‘album package.’ His idea was to create a visual to complement the musical.  It was an instant success, and spawned an entire new field of illustration and design:  Album Cover Art.  Steinweiss was the king of the genre; his covers are still regarded as icons.In his four decade career, Steinweiss created album covers for musical luminaries such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Igor Stravinisky and Benny Goodman.” The 1939 Rogers & Hart album cover, shown here, was one of his first.

We will soon be hearing more about his work. Steven Heller and Kevin Reagan have a Taschen book on his work that I think will be released in June. His subsequent work during the 1940s reflects a completely modern approach to design that we will review in the package design of the next decade.