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.

@issue: now online

Got an email today mentioning that @issue:, the publication of The Corporate Design Foundation has gone online. Good to see that a great traditional print publication has made the move, and it is good to see them reporting on package design. In fact two of their featured items in the Seen & Noted section feature package design.

I was fascinated by one of the items. It shows the new children’s beverage, called Y Water,  shown in the image below. It has been widely reported and has won a number of design awards recently, but still nice to have package design covered by the design press.

Designed by Yves Béhar, and the good folks at Fuse Project, it is a really great combination of beverage container, kid’s toy, and of course a super launching pad for the new brand. You can get y knots that let you connect the empty beverage containers to as the web site says “connect and build just about anything you can think of”.

The graphics for all the yucky stuff like a UPC, or ingredients or nutrition facts are all on a tag that attaches to the little bottle.

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.