Nanomaterials, more dark matter of brands

Our last post talked about the dark matter of brands in terms certain kinds of knowledge that the consumer has about a brand, some obvious some hidden.

But a recent post in packagingdigest.com suggests that there may be another very real kind of invisible dark matter increasingly showing up in packaging, nanomaterials. As the article points out they could have a huge impact on the environment and our health.

“Nanomaterials are just too tiny to ignore. They’re increasingly being used in packaging and can have the potential to improve a variety of packaging-performance attributes such as oxygen and moisture blockage, ink or dye-free coloration and increased strength while lightweighting.

Nanomaterials can also make packaging “smart” by introducing properties that can react and respond to environmental conditions. For example, a leading food company, in collaboration with Rutgers University and the University of Connecticut, is developing nanoparticle films that can “warn” consumers when food becomes unsafe for consumption by changing color. Researchers in The Netherlands are also experimenting with a nanotechnology “bio-switch” that will release preservatives if food spoilage is detected.”

I suspect we will be hearing more about these materials as their acceptance becomes more widespread.

The dark matter of brands

Lets start with an interesting observation about the cosmos. Contemporary physics suggests that only about 4% of the total energy density in the universe can be seen directly. About 96% is thought to be composed of dark matter or dark energy.

I think this is true for package design as well. Much of what a consumer reacts to on a package is not obvious, and perhaps not even visible.

The mind wanders. Ideas interact in strange ways, and what we know (or can see) has many different forms, some visible and obvious, some not. This is certainly true for package design and brand equity. And I would suggest that physicists and designers share more than they might imagine. Both are searching for ways of observing and measuring this dark matter.

Tom Guarriello has an interesting post on his truetalk blog titled Living and Knowing. In it he discusses the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge. He begins the post by saying,

“We don’t know most of what we know.

That’s because the kind of “knowing” that forms the basis for most of our daily lives—most of what we “know”—is not the kind of knowing that we can easily articulate.

Not to mention, measure.

So we go about our day-to-day lives, knowing lots of things—how to determine where to walk on the sidewalk, how to tell if someone is going to cut in front of us on the highway, if our boss is telling us the truth when she says we’re doing a good job—without the foggiest idea of how we came to that knowledge.

We just know.

This kind of knowledge, what psychologists call implicit, or “tacit knowledge,” is crucial to everyday life.”

By contrast, “explicit knowledge”—the capital of Arkansas, the number of feet in a mile, Derek Jeter’s batting average—is most often what we mean when we say we “know” something.”

I would suggest this is also true with what we think we know about the visual equity of brands, as Tom says  .  .  we don’t know most of what we know.

All packages, new and old, present a certain amount of implicit knowledge on a front panel, the brand name, a photo of the product, perhaps a list of product functions and benefits all contribute to what a consumer knows they know about the brand. Its obvious, visible and right in front of them.

But there would seem to be a huge difference in the amount of dark matter, or explicit knowledge that a consumer “knows” about a brand depending on the amount of exposure they have had to a brand. Any number of things contribute to this including,

1. Whether that brand is new or old
2. How much visual equity the brand has retained on its package over time
3. How long a brand has been in a specific market
4. Whether a consumer has been exposed to the brand in the past
5. What personal experiences the consumer may have had with the brand
6. Is the brand supported by advertising or other consumer brand building programs
7. Is the consumer shopping the category for the first time

Coca Cola, and most well managed older brands, are masters at both the implicit and explicit messages. They do this using a finely crafted combination of the obvious, and the implied. Yes we can see by the graphics that this is Coke Classic, the bottle shape, coke script, red color but the design also includes a mysterious combination of unseen elements of brand heritage.

Think of the last time you saw a Coke package, and ask yourself what percentage of your reaction was based on what you saw, and what percentage was based on what you felt, yet couldn’t see, and was influenced by your lifelong personal experiences with the brand. This is the dark matter that is so hard to measure for brand marketers, and so hard to apply for package designers.

And it strikes me that most package design research is aimed at simply confirming the obvious, what is clearly visible to the consumer on a package, and not so good at learning about the implicit, unseen elements of brand heritage. It may be the research tools they are using are not powerful enough.

At CERN, using this most powerful of research tools, physicists are looking for dark matter in the universe because they think it holds the key to their understanding of the birth, life and death of the cosmos.

The dark matter of brands. We know its there, but we can’t see it, yet marketers increasingly think it holds many of the secrets of a brand’s life. Our quest is a bit more modest, we are simply trying to learn more about what we know and don’t know about brands, but our tools may need to be just as state of the art.

Package/Product Design as Social Media

My last post discussed some early thinking on the implications of Design 2.0. A notion that might just revolutionize the design process much like web 2.0 looks to change the connections we make on line.

There is an interesting piece at the fastcompany.com design blog about product design from the 1970s and 1980s that also could qualify as social media. It is written by Rob Tannen and discusses his research for an upcoming book and now an even better new website called Deconstructing Product Design.

He mentions two specific products, the Polaroid SX-70 camera and the Sony Walkman. And says,

“These seminal products provided technology that enabled sharing pictures, music, and ideas–in other words, social media. Like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and other relatively recent Web 2.0 applications, these pre-digital products also enabled real-time (or near real-time) distribution and sharing of individual experiences.”

Of course the scale of the web, allowing you to interact with hundreds or thousands or heck even millions of people, far exceeds the Walkman’s capability of sharing a music cassette with a few friends, but the concept certainly is the same.

It’s a little disconcerting that we need to be reminded about sharing, as if we had forgotten the concept. I am not a cultural anthropologist, but I suspect somewhere in some blog, or seminar, or graduate course, those who study these things are having fun with the notion that the web invented sharing.

Seems to me its pretty fundamental.

Stephen Randall, and envisioning a new Design 2.0

Stephen Randall invented the digital guitar, and is the founder of LocaModa here in Cambridge. He spoke today at the DMI conference on what he called “Moving Design from Impression to Expression”.  I’ll simply call it, Design 2.0, a really articulate call to arms for the use and impact of social media in the design process.

As he said in his introduction, “what are the challenges facing brands, agencies, and designers, and how can multi-channel user experiences still result in a unified message?”

He began by describing the impressionistiic “old” media of books, TV, and radio as a media form that is a monologue  .  .  one-way  .  .  passive and a push form of communication. He then described the promise of web 2.0 as filled with expressionistic, open, real time, connected, cross-channel, cross-platform, user-generated content that has a foundation in personalization and collaboration.

As he spoke, it began to occur to me that when he described the form and function of “old” media it sounded a lot like a description of the traditional design process between a design consultant and client. A process that historically results in a monologue by the design firm and is usually a one way form of communication with the consultant doing most of the talking.

I began to imagine what a Design 2.0 process could act like. It would be much more collaborative and personal to be sure. It could be more interactive with the client, consumer and other stakeholders involved more often. It could be open source, and have a real-time component with various forms of social media playing a role. But serious questions began to emerge as I envisioned this new design process.

First let me be clear I come to this discussion as the owner of a package design firm. That means that while we make a transition from design process 1.0 to 2.0 I still need to keep the lights on. So identifying revenue opportunities is important to me and receiving honest value will continue to be important to our clients.

So at the end of Stephen’s talk I asked him what he thought Design 2.0 will look like, and if he has seen any examples of design processes and/or organizations that are beginning to make the transition. I mentioned that to me, at least so far, very few industries have survived this kind of turmoil intact. I mentioned the music industry as one example where the artists, music publishers, and retailers are all still struggling with new business models. And certainly the publishing and print media industry is going through similar strife at this moment.

I can’t think of a single industry that creates intellectual property that isn’t stressing about the future. Certainly crowd-sourced design sites aren’t a solution for much of anything other than stealing work from designers to the benefit of greedy web site operators and naive clients.

His answer was twofold. First, he was not aware of a specific case of a design firm that has changed its processes to completely embrace Design 2.0. And second, he suggested that the industry may need to go to more of a process based rather than product based compensation method. I guess this would suggest that a design firm act as the ring leader for the final solution rather than as the sole source for the solutions.

And I admit to being a bit confused by his final suggestion that we may need to look toward royalty based rather than fee based compensation systems. Hmmm. I began to wonder whether he has looked at the work for hire contracts that I am asked to sign with any of our large consumer product company clients.

So I was left with this. While I am a big fan of the notion of Web 2.0, and certainly have a growing appreciation, with the help and advice from friends like Grant McCracken, for its fundamental and ever-increasing role in keeping our firm in front of the world, I see it still as strategically a communications platform. So I am not yet sure how, or even whether, this communication platform should be used as a platform for the new Design 2.0 business model.

Anyone have any ideas?

John Maeda, and design leadership

This is the second entry from the 34th Annual Design Management Institute conference titled, Design Complexity and Change. And it was a great day

John Maeda, the current President of the Rhode Island School of Design and the former MIT Professor of Media Arts and Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab, gave an inspirational presentation on Creative Leadership. He spoke about  his experiences during the first year at RISD, and the inherent conflicts of the artist as administrator at one of the most respected centers for creative learning in the country. .

His current gig at RISD allows him to view first hand the intersection of education, art and design, and he spoke eloquently about his perceptions of the similarities and differences between the two disciplines. He suggested that artists are great at asking questions, while designers create solutions.

He also spoke about the traditional role of technology to support business, and more importantly how design thinking is now being included in much of this decision-making. Interestingly he feels that art, or more specifically the unique ability of artists to ask questions, may be the future fourth element in business decision-making.

But it was his observations about science that caught my attention. He suggested a very clear and concise analogy for the role of design in business. He maintains that engineers are to science what designers are to art. Designers bring logic and methodology to the arts just as engineers bring reality to raw science.

This seems like a wonderfully clear way for designers to demonstrate an unmistakable distinction between the discipline of their creative methodology and the role of an artist. Again artists ask questions, while designers create solutions.

Alan Webber and the cost of the status quo

This week I am up in Boston attending the 34th Annual Design Management Institute conference titled, Design Complexity and Change. And will be trying to blog at least once a day from the conference.

Alan Webber, the Founder of Fast Company magazine and former Managing Editor of the Harvard Business Review, was one of the first speakers on Sunday, and he talked eloquently for much of his time about the 3 reasons he saw as current the role of design, and the unique ability of design thinking to identify not just the issues of the marketplace but also the wider social issues of our time,

1. To solve problems

2. To initiate change

3. To announce innovation

But what was really compelling was his conclusion on the future role of design. He felt designers, and inherently our design thinking, must help identify the costs of the status quo. And he used what he called a business equation to demonstrate the point.

He maintains that “Change happens when the cost of the status quo becomes more expensive than the risk of change.” Fascinating.

His example was General Motors who relentlessly sought solutions based on what it thought was the unchanging status quo of cheap gas and cheap money. When the cost of both skyrocketed they did not have the tools to change quickly enough. They did not accurately measure the cost of the status quo vs. the risk of change. They had no way, or no interest, in measuring the real cost of the status quo.

Let me give you a very simple example of how fundamental this cost analysis could be for designers and our consumer product clients.

I have a client who is struggling with the next step in our project. We have completed a strategic analysis of their brand design issues, as well as a Phase I design exploration for the packaging of their lead product based on this analysis. The client is a small family owned manufacturer with a leading share in a niche consumer product category. Much of the success, or implied failure, of the company is tied to this one brand. While being very comfortable with our work, he expressed a deep reservation to change. In other words he felt the cost of the status quo was not higher than the risk of change.

Intuitively I think he is wrong, but as a designer I have no current tools to suggest, let alone prove, otherwise. We can do exhaustive consumer research, we can point to the hugely beneficial results of other specific examples of change for our clients, we can review how the competition is moving relentlessly ahead, but we simply can’t quantitatively prove the cost of the status quo.

Some of my design colleagues are struggling with what they think is the holy grail for design, finding a formula to measure return on investment in design. That is all well and good, and I encourage their quest. But I think Alan’s equation might be even more powerful.

Imagine the day when designers can point to their ideas and not just say, we think this is the right direction for all of the appropriate strategic and creative reasons, but just as importantly, this is what it will cost you if you don’t change!

Accountants beware. Today there is no line item measuring the depreciated value of inaction on any balance sheet, or the cost of the status quo on any P&L statement. But imagine the day when designers can identify those costs along with each of their strategic design recommendations.

I will call this new index ROC or Return On Change, and think it may be more interesting than just measuring the ROI of design. Lets see if we can find a way to measure it.

Package Design, a leading or trailing indicator, 1950-1960

Package design in the decade of the 1950s, more strongly than in any previous decade, was influenced by dramatic changes in consumer lifestyles.

The post-war suburbanization, growth in families and income, the birth of national TV advertising, consolidation of consumer product companies, and the explosion of national retailers, all led to a single new development, the creation of brands to support these changes in consumer lifestyle.

During the 1950’s consumer brands and package design consolidated an important third stage in their historic evolution.

Stage One – The Retailer
During the first stage, until roughly the end of the 19^th century, a package was merely the vehicle for the product in a direct hand-to-hand exchange at the store. During a time when the storeowner and the consumer often had life-long ties, the package merely acted as the physical reinforcement of the personal bond and pledge of quality between the retailer and the consumer.

Stage Two – The Manufacturer
During the second stage, through the first half of the 20^th century, the package began to take on the role of surrogate for the producer. It often depicted imagery of the manufacturer, their picture, a picture of their factory, a list of awards or honors won by the product, or testimonials by consumers. With the growth of national brands and retailers in the early 20^th century, this kind of brand imagery was used as a replacement for the personal bond between a consumer and the storeowner.

Stage Three – The Brand
By the end of the 1940s, a third stage in the design of consumer packaging had become dominant. This stage was, for the first time, much more consistently focused on the communication of brand personality, not enhancing the personal reputation of the retailer as in stage one, or supporting the manufacturer as in stage two. This stage was all about the development of the brand, and was characterized by the emergence of package design with two distinct functions.

The first emerging function was the communication of visual brand equity, again not the retailer’s equity or manufacturer’s equity. This went hand in hand with the rise of consumerism in the 1950s. The package became an independent communicator of its own brand personality. In this new retail environment a package was expected to build a unique personality and a value of its own.

The second function was simply to attract attention. In the post-war decade large grocery retailers increased their share of market from 35% to 62% and the average number of items in the store virtually doubled from 3,000 to almost 6,000. As a result, package designers began to use a much bolder more graphic style, and approach able to quickly communicate in national TV advertising and the larger retail stores.

The decade began with the formation, by my former boss Walter Margulies, of The Package Design Council in 1952. A group of about 11 prominent designers including, Egmont Arens, Alan Berni, Karl Fink, Frank Gianninoto, and Gerald Stahl were the original members. James Nash was elected its first President.

As a personal aside I was the organization’s last President in 1995 before the membership voted to merge with the AIGA.

In this post I have featured many products that were introduced in the 1950’s. While not a scientific sampling, it is clear that this work contains a certain simplicity of style. I own a copy of a marvelous book published in 1953, by Ladislav Sutnar titled Package Design: A Force For Visual Selling. Michael Bierut talks about this book in his own book Looking Closer. In reaction to this simplicity he says, “It is tempting to call designs of this era naïve. But I don’t think so. Not these designs. It would be, I think, incorrect to call Paul Rand’s Bab-o cleanser container naïve. It had a kind of knowing beatnik look. .  . The main differences between those old packages and the one we have today is style.  .  .  Technology is style.”

He is pointing out that these packages of the 1950s, at least in part, look the way they do because of the art production technology of the time. Essentially everything, except the small type, was hand-rendered, the logotypes, patterned backgrounds, illustrations, everything. The designers of the time of course used, rapidographs and ruling pens, with circle templates and triangles, not a mouse to compose their work. And of course it was all pasted up by hand. We were still 40 years away from the first Photoshop filters.

By the end of the decade even the Museum of Modern Art in New York had recognized the growing importance of package design. It mounted an exhibition called simply, The Package, in 1959. This exhibition was one in a series, curated by Mildred Constantine and Arthur Drexler, on what they called “well designed and useful objects”.

In the catalogue for the show they discussed a number of packaging issues that would continue to inspire and frustrate the consumer for the next 50 years. In fact their show was grouped into two major categories: The Disposable Package, and The Re-Usable Package. They talked about functional performance vs. esthetics, natural vs. man-made materials, and the fact that “an alarming number of packages are more elaborate and more costly than the things they contain.”

But in the final paragraph of the catalogue even the MOMA curators recognized that the package had become a vehicle for creating a brand identity with a retail role far beyond a simple vessel when they wrote “The aesthetic quality of the package, as of other artifacts, is the result of a conscious effort to organize materials and functions into clear shapes and relationships, with a due concern for their effect on the eye.”

The 1950s was a time of dramatic cultural shifts. It was the first decade where package designers began to feel all of the influences of a new consumerism, the modern media, national retailers, and a thriving economy, that would go on to shape much of the remaining 20^th century.

Here is a fascinating list of just a few events that shaped the package design, and consumer product world of the 1950s.

1950
• Alvin Lustig designs the signs and graphics for America’s first shopping malls, The Northland Center, designed by Victor Gruen
• Charles Schulz first Peanuts strip runs
• Minute Rice and Sugar Pops are introduced
• Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook among the top-selling non-fiction book
• Phototypesetting, with the Lumitype/Photon machine, is begun by Deberny & Peignot in France
• Charles Peignot hires designers to adapt existing fonts to the new technology

1951
• Speedy Alka Seltzer is introduced
• Polaroid Land camera is introduced by Edwin Land
• The CBS eye is designed for William Golden by my friend Kurt Weihs

1952
• The Package Design Council is started by 11 prominent designers including Walter Margulies
• First diet soda, No-Cal Ginger Ale, is introduced by Kirsch Beverages in Brooklyn
• First powdered creamer, Pream, is launched by M&R Dietetic Labs
• First tranquilizer, Reserprine, is developed
• Mrs Paul’s Frozen Fish Sticks in introduced
• Optima typeface is designed by Hermann Zapf

1953
• Swanson Frozen Turkey Dinner introduced
• Eggo Frozen Waffles are launched
• DNA structure is discovered

1954
Butterball Turkey
J.R.R. Tolkien publishes The Lord of The Rings, On The Waterfront premieres
The first McDonald’s store opened by Ray Kroc
Ladislav Sutnar publishes Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling

1955
Marlboro cigarette package redesigned by Frank Gianninoto

1956
• The Letraset Company id founded in London
• Imperial Margarine is introduced

1957
• Ettore Sottsass Jr. begins collaboration with Olivetti
• Helvetica, originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, is designed by Eduard Hoffman and Max Miedinger for HAAS Type Foundry in Switzerland
• Univers is designed by Andrian Frutiger for Deberny & Peignot
• Mr. Clean is launched

1958
• The Optima typeface is designed by Hermann Zapf

1959
• Barbie is introduced
• Paul Rand design colorforms logo
• MOMA shows its first package design exhibit

References

The Museum of Modern Art, Vol 27, NO. 1 Fall 1959. The Package. New York. MOMA Bulletin.

Ladislav, Sutnar. 1953. Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling. New York: Arts, Inc.

Pulos, Arthur. 1988. The American Design Adventure. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Steven Heller and Elinor Pettit. 2000. Graphic Design Timeline. New York: Allworth Press.

Jankowski, Jerry. 1998. Shelf Space, Modern Package Design 1945-1965. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Barabara E. Kahn and Leigh McAlistar. 1997. Grocery Revolution, The New Focus on the Consumer. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Longman

Duffy, Its simple

I have always been a big fan of Joe Duffy’s work, its simply marvelous, or is it marvelously simple, or both.

He has always been that rare combination of exquisite creative craftsman as well as consummate strategic thinker. In his new guest blog gig this week at fastcompany.com he talks about the ability to design with simplicity. He doesn’t downplay the role strategy should play in our creative process, he just seems to be saying that the work should speak for itself. And his work usually does.

As he says, ”After all my years in design, I remain wary of the branding and design consultancies that sell the strategic process before the work. The work should speak for itself. Did it deliver on its objectives? Did it break through in the market? Did people vote with interest, conversation, interaction or purchase? Was it beautiful? That’s what really matters.”

In the last few months fastcompany.com has started an expert design blogger of the week column, some have contributed a series of inspirational posts, some frankly have been exercises in self absorbed silliness, no names now. But to be fair, I’m not sure what I would do with the platform.

But I am sure it will be interesting to read Joe’s thoughts this week.

Gourmet and the Future of Expertise

Read this,

“The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.”

This was written by Christopher Kimball, the publisher of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, in an Op Ed piece earlier this week in The New York Times, obviously in response to the death of Gourmet magazine.

But it strikes me that his piece is really talking to all of us who sell any kind of expertise, yes, but more importantly feel that there is value in a lifetime of real experience. This blog has ranted often about the use of crowd sourced web sites for design, and discouraged work on spec. All of this done in support of the notion that design has value, and the value is derived from the shared experience of us, our colleagues, and certainly our clients.

Mr. Kimball goes on to say,

“To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google “broccoli casserole” and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise — the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks.”

Seems to me he is not just talking about the publishing industry, he is also giving good advice to the design industry.

Good Housekeeping Green Seal picks first products

We feel a bit ambivalent about the whole Good Housekeeping Green Seal initiative, and there certainly has been a lot of heated discussion online here, and here, and here for instance, since the program was announced in the Spring. Many think that its just another package button that will simply add to the “green” confusion. My sense is that overall it will at least increase consumer awareness.

To be fair Good Housekeeping has a long list of criteria that the product must meet in order to even be considered for application. This starts with the traditional product functionality testing, but also requires no animal testing, no ozone depleting compounds, it must meet the California’s Regulation for Reducing Volatile Organic Compound Emissions, have a reasonably neutral PH balance,  and the list goes on and on from here.

For manufacturing processes, they review things like greenhouse gas emissions, waste reduction measures, water usage, the distribution system, energy efficiency, and lastly the general level of corporate responsibility.

And for packaging materials this includes, weight of packaging, sources of packaging materials, use of certified materials in packaging, use of recycled content in packaging, inclusion of genetically modified organisms in packaging materials, biodegradability of packaging, use of PVC in packaging, and recyclability of packaging. Not a bad start.

We were happy to see that Aveeno Soothing Bath Treatment was one of the first seven products to earn this new seal, as the recent press release announces.

And as those who follow our work already know, the Johnson & Johnson Aveeno line holds a special place in our heart and in our portfolio.