• St. Bernadine Mission Communications
• Straydog
• Studiobubble
• Subplot Design Inc.
• TACN
• The Small Monsters
• Werle Design Associates
• We The Collective
• Woodward Design

By Mary Zalla

The word is out: Great design delivers great business advantage. Design is being increasingly leveraged to move and shape markets, attract customers, and help differentiate among competing products and services.

There is no doubt that consumers are more design savvy now than ever before. For example, interior design shows seem to outnumber game shows on television, American car manufacturers have been bested by their overseas design-oriented competitors, and La-Z-Boy has hired Todd Oldham to inject new life into a design-starved brand.

Yet despite its competitive advantages, very few companies and brands are truly leveraging the full, business-building power of breakthrough design. While there are many examples of aesthetically pleasing design, these designs usually follow the rules and meet category conventions. There are far fewer genuinely innovative designs. Design that is truly revolutionary and non-incremental, design that dares to be first, is in short supply.

Daring to dare

Consider packaging. Many brands artificially limit the power of package design to concepts such as color ownership, extractable branding units, or unique structures. While these elements can work together to deliver great design, in and of themselves they merely serve to differentiate the product at the point of consideration. They cannot be individually tied to trial, repurchase, and loyalty.

But great design can and does deliver these benefits. For example, Crest Vivid White is a superior toothpaste with breakthrough tooth-whitening capability. The package’s vertical orientation, sans serif font, embossing, and clean side panel clearly define a cosmetic product, appealing to consumers who consider oral care part of their beauty regimen. But the design speaks just as loudly to consumers more focused on health care.

Although Crest Vivid White competes head-to-head with Colgate Simply White, a shopper would be hard-pressed to quickly identify Colgate Simply White based on its packaging as either a beauty or a health care product.

In the first three months following its launch, Crest Vivid White exceeded sales forecasts by nearly 300%, and Vivid White was the top-selling oral care item in Target stores during the first quarter of 2006. Just because no company had ever designed a cosmetic-looking oral care package didn’t mean it should never be done. What has been done will only get you so far. Great design is about what can be done.
Breakthrough packaging

Daring to be different is a courageous undertaking. After all, there is comfort in conformity and convention. When a brand’s opportunity to make an impression on consumers is largely confined to packaging, there is a tendency to adhere even more closely to category conventions. Not only does this have a chilling effect on design, it also limits a brand’s ability to deliver anything meaningful beyond category antes. Clarifying brand promise goes out the door, stripping away any basis for choosing or preferring one brand over another.

For example, Mama Capri, Coppola, and Paesana are three competing brands of premium pasta sauce. All the packages feature a photo or illustration of a young Italian woman with covered head. All the labels employ a sans serif font and white or yellow type against a mostly black background. All three have Italian-based brand names and nearly identical containers with gold lids. So even if shoppers were able to decide at the shelf which brand to buy, and had a positive experience using it, would they be able to replicate the brand purchase two to four weeks later? More likely they would find themselves in the pasta sauce aisle, staring at the three brands and trying to remember which one they had enjoyed.

The same holds true for canned tuna. Is there an FDA regulation mandating that all canned tuna packaging be blue and white? Why is no brand offering a distinctive impression of itself against its competitors? Microwave popcorn is in a similar situation. Here is an ideal opportunity for one of these brands to better articulate its unique promise.

This pattern of conformity plays out in category after category. A true brand steward or student of design would consider this thinking counterproductive. Many brands find little opportunity beyond product packaging to communicate their promise to consumers. While this constraint may encourage insular thinking and resistance to bucking tradition, it also creates an opportunity to unleash the power of great design. Taking full advantage of design under such circumstances is rather like turning your car into a skid. It may go against every natural inclination and feel very uncomfortable at first, but after you’ve averted the crisis you know that it was the right thing to do.

Here’s another example of category convention trumping the opportunity to clarify brand promise and compel purchase. The frozen cheese stick category once had three major competitors—Ore-Ida, Anchor, and Farm Rich. Each brand claimed approximately a third of the market, ticking up or down a few points depending on who had fielded the latest pricing promotion. It was hard to tell them apart—as if the three competitors had a tacit agreement to look, act, and be the same at the shelf. All the packages featured cartoonish and childish fonts, oversaturated and unsophisticated colors, and whimsical (though hardly appetizing) illustrations of food or ingredients. Each seemed to say: “I am a juvenile product, overly focused on fun, for a strictly childish audience.”

When T.G.I. Friday’s (licensed by Anchor) entered the fray, market share for each of the three existing competitors started to fall. The Friday’s brand offered the unique promise of “restaurant quality food in your home freezer” and did an admirable job of extending Friday’s visual equities into the category.

Clearly, there was room in the category for a brand with family appeal—a brand that could lay claim to great taste as well as fun. Farm Rich decided to capture this position. It already regularly bested its competitors in taste tests, and could uniquely position itself as rich, satisfying, real food for the whole family. The business team realized that the previously marginalized Farm Rich brand name was capable of providing a robust platform for future growth, whereas the strictly food form based names such as Dippers, Poppers, and Bites are clearly and functionally limiting.

The Dippers brand was restaged as Farm Rich, using appealing photographs of real food to reinforce the message that its ingredients were authentic. Retail sales of Farm Rich cheese snacks rose 42%. Great design and the courage to go against category convention rendered the Farm Rich promise more evident, connecting it to the product experience and making the brand more attractive to consumers.

Brand ‘coupons’

While it’s easy to see how good design works with sexy products such as toothpaste and cheese sticks, how does it fare in more mundane categories? Consider coupons. Few people would associate coupons with design. Even coupon zealots would say the most important drivers of coupon clipping are coupon value and expiration date. But add the intoxicating power of great design, and people do respond.

Over 251 billion coupons are sent out to consumers each year. Most are distributed in Sunday papers as free standing coupon inserts (FSCIs). A majority of Procter & Gamble’s North American brands regularly participate in multiple FSCI events each year. This improves scale efficiencies, optimizes coupon payout, and more closely ties the individual brands to their corporate parent.

P&G decided to create a multiple-brand coupon booklet. This well-designed custom publication, brandSAVER, not only engages consumers with relevant product messages and savings opportunities, but also establishes an emotional connection with its audience. The magazine ties color, design, and a real-life, contemporary photographic style to a particular theme or event.

P&G’s brandSAVER has been and continues to be hugely successful, consistently delivering a 44% better return on investment than solo FSCI executions, and a single average brandSAVER event results in 26% more incremental product volume than an entire year of participation in other executions. Great design is also responsible for 9% more new-item trial, as well as 7% higher overall loyalty to P &G among brandSAVER users. If the brandSAVER team had been content with how coupons were designed and delivered in the past, brandSAVER would be a completely different publication with far less impressive results.

The promise of design

The notion that great design appeals only to the discerning few is as outdated as dial-up Internet access. Just about everyone appreciates good design or is moved by it in some way. Recognizing this, smart marketers have made design an important part of the brand experience.

Design is one of the most effective and engaging ways to bring your brand promise to life, and the single most potent vehicle to move consumers from consideration to purchase. It can credibly and compellingly articulate the brand experience and initiate deeper and more rewarding interactions with consumers.

Great design asks what can be done rather than what has been done. The challenge to you and your organization is to learn from the past, while keeping in mind that great design is forward focused. Great design always asks “What if…?”

http://www.packagedesignmag.com/issues/2008.04/retail.shtml

By Mary Zalla

The word is out: Great design delivers great business advantage. Design is being increasingly leveraged to move and shape markets, attract customers, and help differentiate among competing products and services.

There is no doubt that consumers are more design savvy now than ever before. For example, interior design shows seem to outnumber game shows on television, American car manufacturers have been bested by their overseas design-oriented competitors, and La-Z-Boy has hired Todd Oldham to inject new life into a design-starved brand.

Yet despite its competitive advantages, very few companies and brands are truly leveraging the full, business-building power of breakthrough design. While there are many examples of aesthetically pleasing design, these designs usually follow the rules and meet category conventions. There are far fewer genuinely innovative designs. Design that is truly revolutionary and non-incremental, design that dares to be first, is in short supply.

Daring to dare

Consider packaging. Many brands artificially limit the power of package design to concepts such as color ownership, extractable branding units, or unique structures. While these elements can work together to deliver great design, in and of themselves they merely serve to differentiate the product at the point of consideration. They cannot be individually tied to trial, repurchase, and loyalty.

But great design can and does deliver these benefits. For example, Crest Vivid White is a superior toothpaste with breakthrough tooth-whitening capability. The package’s vertical orientation, sans serif font, embossing, and clean side panel clearly define a cosmetic product, appealing to consumers who consider oral care part of their beauty regimen. But the design speaks just as loudly to consumers more focused on health care.

Although Crest Vivid White competes head-to-head with Colgate Simply White, a shopper would be hard-pressed to quickly identify Colgate Simply White based on its packaging as either a beauty or a health care product.

In the first three months following its launch, Crest Vivid White exceeded sales forecasts by nearly 300%, and Vivid White was the top-selling oral care item in Target stores during the first quarter of 2006. Just because no company had ever designed a cosmetic-looking oral care package didn’t mean it should never be done. What has been done will only get you so far. Great design is about what can be done.

Breakthrough packaging

Daring to be different is a courageous undertaking. After all, there is comfort in conformity and convention. When a brand’s opportunity to make an impression on consumers is largely confined to packaging, there is a tendency to adhere even more closely to category conventions. Not only does this have a chilling effect on design, it also limits a brand’s ability to deliver anything meaningful beyond category antes. Clarifying brand promise goes out the door, stripping away any basis for choosing or preferring one brand over another.

For example, Mama Capri, Coppola, and Paesana are three competing brands of premium pasta sauce. All the packages feature a photo or illustration of a young Italian woman with covered head. All the labels employ a sans serif font and white or yellow type against a mostly black background. All three have Italian-based brand names and nearly identical containers with gold lids. So even if shoppers were able to decide at the shelf which brand to buy, and had a positive experience using it, would they be able to replicate the brand purchase two to four weeks later? More likely they would find themselves in the pasta sauce aisle, staring at the three brands and trying to remember which one they had enjoyed.

The same holds true for canned tuna. Is there an FDA regulation mandating that all canned tuna packaging be blue and white? Why is no brand offering a distinctive impression of itself against its competitors? Microwave popcorn is in a similar situation. Here is an ideal opportunity for one of these brands to better articulate its unique promise.

This pattern of conformity plays out in category after category. A true brand steward or student of design would consider this thinking counterproductive. Many brands find little opportunity beyond product packaging to communicate their promise to consumers. While this constraint may encourage insular thinking and resistance to bucking tradition, it also creates an opportunity to unleash the power of great design. Taking full advantage of design under such circumstances is rather like turning your car into a skid. It may go against every natural inclination and feel very uncomfortable at first, but after you’ve averted the crisis you know that it was the right thing to do.

Here’s another example of category convention trumping the opportunity to clarify brand promise and compel purchase. The frozen cheese stick category once had three major competitors—Ore-Ida, Anchor, and Farm Rich. Each brand claimed approximately a third of the market, ticking up or down a few points depending on who had fielded the latest pricing promotion. It was hard to tell them apart—as if the three competitors had a tacit agreement to look, act, and be the same at the shelf. All the packages featured cartoonish and childish fonts, oversaturated and unsophisticated colors, and whimsical (though hardly appetizing) illustrations of food or ingredients. Each seemed to say: “I am a juvenile product, overly focused on fun, for a strictly childish audience.”

When T.G.I. Friday’s (licensed by Anchor) entered the fray, market share for each of the three existing competitors started to fall. The Friday’s brand offered the unique promise of “restaurant quality food in your home freezer” and did an admirable job of extending Friday’s visual equities into the category.

Clearly, there was room in the category for a brand with family appeal—a brand that could lay claim to great taste as well as fun. Farm Rich decided to capture this position. It already regularly bested its competitors in taste tests, and could uniquely position itself as rich, satisfying, real food for the whole family. The business team realized that the previously marginalized Farm Rich brand name was capable of providing a robust platform for future growth, whereas the strictly food form based names such as Dippers, Poppers, and Bites are clearly and functionally limiting.

The Dippers brand was restaged as Farm Rich, using appealing photographs of real food to reinforce the message that its ingredients were authentic. Retail sales of Farm Rich cheese snacks rose 42%. Great design and the courage to go against category convention rendered the Farm Rich promise more evident, connecting it to the product experience and making the brand more attractive to consumers.

Brand ‘coupons’

While it’s easy to see how good design works with sexy products such as toothpaste and cheese sticks, how does it fare in more mundane categories? Consider coupons. Few people would associate coupons with design. Even coupon zealots would say the most important drivers of coupon clipping are coupon value and expiration date. But add the intoxicating power of great design, and people do respond.

Over 251 billion coupons are sent out to consumers each year. Most are distributed in Sunday papers as free standing coupon inserts (FSCIs). A majority of Procter & Gamble’s North American brands regularly participate in multiple FSCI events each year. This improves scale efficiencies, optimizes coupon payout, and more closely ties the individual brands to their corporate parent.

P&G decided to create a multiple-brand coupon booklet. This well-designed custom publication, brandSAVER, not only engages consumers with relevant product messages and savings opportunities, but also establishes an emotional connection with its audience. The magazine ties color, design, and a real-life, contemporary photographic style to a particular theme or event.

P&G’s brandSAVER has been and continues to be hugely successful, consistently delivering a 44% better return on investment than solo FSCI executions, and a single average brandSAVER event results in 26% more incremental product volume than an entire year of participation in other executions. Great design is also responsible for 9% more new-item trial, as well as 7% higher overall loyalty to P &G among brandSAVER users. If the brandSAVER team had been content with how coupons were designed and delivered in the past, brandSAVER would be a completely different publication with far less impressive results.

The promise of design

The notion that great design appeals only to the discerning few is as outdated as dial-up Internet access. Just about everyone appreciates good design or is moved by it in some way. Recognizing this, smart marketers have made design an important part of the brand experience.

Design is one of the most effective and engaging ways to bring your brand promise to life, and the single most potent vehicle to move consumers from consideration to purchase. It can credibly and compellingly articulate the brand experience and initiate deeper and more rewarding interactions with consumers.

Great design asks what can be done rather than what has been done. The challenge to you and your organization is to learn from the past, while keeping in mind that great design is forward focused. Great design always asks “What if…?”

 http://www.packagedesignmag.com/issues/2008.04/retail.shtml

How green is green enough?…and how committed does a company have to be in terms of dollars and cents to be a good eco-citizen?…and can an environmentally conscious public raise their sustainable requirements so high that it becomes economically unfeasible for companies to even attempt to meet them?

Some may call it selling out, compromising, or even “sustainability lite,” but I believe in a realistic, common sense approach to sustainability. I am convinced sustainability in the packaging world will be best accomplished with what can be a very delicate, and at times uncomfortable, coexistence of determination and patience.

I believe we have to accept that while we move toward absolute standards and consistent definitions, today to a certain degree we live with “subjective sustainability,” in the sense that others’ ideas of what is sustainable or even eco-friendly may not be identical to our own. I also believe it is good and even wise to applaud the smallest steps as long as they are in the right direction. Ironically, it is really not much different than the way we cheer and celebrate a child’s first unsteady—but usually very enthusiastic—steps in life.

A taste for waste?

Whether we are talking about spoiled consumers or gluttonous companies, we are conditioned to feed to excess and to be the world’s greatest consumer of resources. None of us was tattooed at birth with “born to kill….the environment,” and I doubt anyone will ever prove that we suffer from a genetic predisposition for environmental recklessness. Being incredibly wasteful does, however, appear to be a learned skill and we have all become darn good at it.

From a packaging perspective, the solution is really not all that difficult to understand: utilize better, more earth friendly materials (production); use less of those materials (application); and know how you are going to utilize or process them in the end (disposal).

When you cut through the details, biases, and opinions, that is really all it comes down to. Then why is sustainability proving to be such a difficult task? Is it because for a very, very long time, we have enjoyed tremendous prosperity that allowed us to have little regard for what we take out of our earth and even less care for what we put back into it in terms of waste?

How many environmentalists does it take to shift a paradigm?

It sounds like a terrific opening line for a late night TV joke but it is a legitimate question. I spoke to a friend of the cause earlier today and she referred to sustainability as not a movement but a dramatic, tremendous paradigm shift—and she is right. What we are asking consumers and companies to do is so far from what they have always done, we have to understand that this is going to take some time.

For benefit of the impatient zealots out there: No, I am not talking about decades but let’s assume it may take a few years! Let’s also accept and understand that such a dramatic reversal in behavior is going to be painful for everyone concerned. It is going to be excruciating for those people going through the change, as well as for the ones impatiently observing their slow forward progress. All I can say is the obvious. The environment did not get into this awful condition overnight and the solution is probably going to take a little longer than any of us would like.

According to the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments movie, the Israelites who escaped from Pharaoh, after losing faith and behaving very badly, were forced to roam the desert until the sinful generation had died. Then and only then was the new, faithful generation allowed to enter the beloved Promised Land. Having crossed the magical threshold of 50 several years ago, I am definitely not suggesting accelerating the Baby Boomers’ departure. I am, however, suggesting a little common sense and understanding. Environmentally, we have all behaved very badly. But with a lot of hard work, and a little patience, this much needed cleansing process will hopefully not take a generation to accomplish.

Depending on your perspective, a 12-oz. or 330-ml can of soda is either a quickly drunk single serving or something to consume over a period of time. Up until now, if you fell into the latter group, you were consigned to drink soda that became increasingly flatter and flatter, given that the can, once opened, cannot be reclosed.

Easy auf and zu

However, for those consumers in Germany who are looking for portability from their metal cans, there ‘s a new package to help answer that need. Coca-Cola is now offering (in Germany only) a regular Coke can with a resealable swiveling closure. A sticker on the plastic closure is marked “open” and “close” (“auf” and “zu”), with a directional arrow. On the side of the can is another diagram with a three step explanation.

Consumers push the tab “auf” to expose the opening and contents of the can. After drinking or pouring (drinking from the can is a bit challenging, given the placement and size of the opening), consumers can then push in the direction of “zu” to close the can so that the contents can be finished another time.

This is the first time we have seen this closure on any package. The design company, 4Sight Innovation, based in The Netherlands, currently does not have the special closure on other products, but no doubt we ‘ll be seeing it more in the future. Coke is selling the cans individually in stores in Germany.

Reclosing markets

We would guess that this closure (especially on carbonated soft drinks) is one that has the best potential in Europe rather than in North America. That conclusion comes from the assumption that U.S. consumers are a bit more likely to drink an entire can at one sitting—or in one gulp!

While this package is not the first reclosable aluminum can on the market, it is the first to use this type of closure and the first in a standard 330-ml size. The others we have seen on the market have all had twist-off caps and have come in much larger formats, such as Jolt Cola in a 23.5-oz. can. That larger can size with the twist-off metal cap is seen only in the U.S.

The main advantage of this can package could be its potential to stand in for plastic PET bottles. As consumers become more concerned about the environment, and as talk about recyclability continues to grow, we have seen grumblings among consumers and in the press about the benefits of recycling some materials. With aluminum being 100% recyclable and more easily sorted, adding reclosability may help to further boost cans ‘ popularity. And without a cap to keep track of or lose, efficiency-conscious consumers may respond with a gulp and a “Wow.”

http://www.packagedesignmag.com/issues/2008.01/wow.shtml