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Posts tagged ‘Choices’

Sep 17

This brands in your land, but not in my land: how brands & packaging influence my purchase decisions since I moved to London

I remember the day we landed in Sydney, Australia in March 2005.  We (my wife and I) were in our hotel room staring at each other in disbelief that we had just moved our life to the other side of the world.  We knew no one. We had never been there before. All up, we were very far from home and all things familiar. 

This wasn’t a bad thing, mind you.

After we got done with our staring and head shaking, we laid two big, wide-eyed smiles on one another and set out to explore. We were hungry so we went to the corner store to grab a few things to put in the fridge. I got there and…more staring…I hardly recognised one brand on the shelf. 

Yes, the stalwarts were there: Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Kleenex to name just a few.  But what the hell was all that other stuff?!  I wanted to grab and go as I normally would, but my decision became much more laboured and confused.  Where were all the brands I knew, loved and trusted? Back home, stupid. 

I have always loved to go to grocery stores. I am a design and packaging freak.  I love to see when both come together in an engaging way and provide me a significant utility. I do the grocery shopping in our family.  I like to see what is new on the shelves, what has a new look and what new tricks has someone taught an old brand. 

Similar to when I moved to Sydney, I now go to the grocery stores in London and gaze out amongst all of the unknown-brand-madness and try to make sense of it all. I’ll give you one example.

My wife and I were at Waitroes, an upscale grocery store in South Kensington.  They have a high quality prepared hot food selection as well as refrigerated/packaged prepared foods.  We were in the soup section which has many, many products/options: organic, low fat, lottsa fat, “veggie pots”…you name it. 

Being a stranger in a strange land with all these strange brands, we defaulted to three criteria to choose from: appearance (brand & packaging), health and “flavour”.  The first two were the traffic lights and roads signs…which direction should we go?  Once we solved that, then heath & flavour options were very much similar across the board.

(We didn’t stand there and draft up a criteria.  This is what we did as a knee jerk reaction)

There were three brands we looked at.  Please remember that I have no history with these brands at all.  I am just going on first impression. Also, I am not going to touch on price since we were in an upscale joint and expected to pay a premium.

Cov_garden

The first one was called “Covent Garden Food Co.”.  The first thing that I noticed was the container. It was closed. I could see what was inside?  What does the consistency look like?  Can I see some of the ingredients that claim are in there?  Or is this going to be like a bag of chips…more air than product in the bag?

Secondly, the images of the vegetables and other ingredients are drawings…caricatures of the real thing.  Why?  Personally I want my healthy, from the earth ingredients to be as real on the outside as they claim to be on the inside. 

Verdict: No chance. For the first timer, you can’t hide everything behind packaging and drawings before you’ve earned my trust.  Hey, it might be the best tasting soup there for all I know…but, it didn’t have me at hello.

Farmers_hero

Next up: Waitrose’s own private label, “Farmer’s Hero”.  Ah, now we are getting some place. The packaging invites me in to see all of the ingredients that it says are in there.  Now, this brand and product is talking to me.  I can have an open conversation with my potential dinner, rather than get the cold shoulder from the previous packaging. 

We had only been in Waitrose for a few minutes, but we liked the place.  This being a Waitrose product helped sway us.

Bonus points for adding the human touch and showing support for the local farmers (hey, this is marketing, right?). If this was the U.S., there would have been a botoxed, fake chested, collagen infected blond rubbing that lettuce up and down the inside of her thighs on that label. Not a bad thing, I know…but not the right brand image here.

Verdict: I’m getting hungry

Veggie_pots

Lastly, we looked at “Veggie Pots” from “Innocent.  Now, if this brand had the same packaging as the first we looked at, it would have no shot. This product needs the clear packaging to show off why it thinks it is different and why you should buy it over “normal” soup. 

The veggie pots are a variation on a theme. Innocent says not to buy a soup that has been blended up into soup-y broth base. You may want something with a broth base, but that has actual chucks, hunks and leafy bits of the actual ingredients. A novel idea that had me thinking that would fill me up more than a simple-r soup.  

The package here is good, the branding…not appetising at all.  If I could not see the ingredients and had to rely on this branding, I wouldn’t have looked twice.  Boring and uninspiring. Not a reflection of the product at in my opinion.

Verdict:  The product better not taste as bland as the creative work. 

So what did we decide?  Option #1 was out for both us.  We liked Options #2 and #3…the food looked good and worth the spend. It came down to heath and flavour; which brand would hit the sweet-spot combo for either of us.  

I chose the Farmer’s Hero and my wife chose Innocent’s Veggie Pot. We decided that we would each try the other’s brand choice later in the week. 
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If you put something on the shelf, treat the packaging and design as a welcome mat. A welcome mat can serve two purposes:  It can send a message to new visitors and/or it can welcome back old friends.

Welcome_mat2

If you put something on the shelf that tells you how good everything inside is and you don’t show them, you run the risk of not inviting people into a trusting environment.  

Go_away

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And another thing: #1

In one of my previous job back in the States, I had the opportunity to utilise a (then) new packaging material to launch a new product I was working on.  The process was the now familiar shrink wrap that so many brands use today. An outside company had presented the material to our operations team.  The head of that team asked us (the marketing department) if any of us had a use for it.  Being a huge advocate of “non-conventional” and risk taking, I jumped at the challenge. 

I got it done, but it wasn’t easy.  I had to overcome many internal and external issues to get people to see the value and utility the brand could derive from using it…even though it meant a significant capital investment.  It was a risk; the bigger risk was playing it safe. 

I did a quick search and found the actual product I designed.  Apparently it won an award. Nice. 



Welch’s multipack could be a first

“Since it unveiled a new 24-count fruit juice package, what could be the first shrink-wrapped multipacks for cans of fruit juices, Welch’s, Concord, MA, reported a 15-percent unit-volume sales increase. The attractive pack, also a first used by Welch’s, includes a 3-mil, extruded low-density polyethylene shrink-film wrap [that was] reverse-flexo-printed in 8 colors…” “The new wrap creates a billboard effect on-shelf with eye-catching graphics designed by Welch’s showing cans of the juice varieties surrounded by the respective fruit ingredients they contain. Adorned with the Welch’s logo and a grape and green color scheme, the results immediately communicate the package contents to consumers, the company says.

Designed for warehouse clubstore sales, the shrink-wrapped package that replaces what PD hears was a labor-intensive film-wrapped tray-pack, contains eight 12-oz cans of three different juice blends – Grape, Fruit Punch and Orange Pineapple – and is designed to shrink in the right places without distorting. Once converted, the film is legible, colorful and informative, displaying its various consumer messages on all panels. Welch’s goal for the new packaging strategy, it says, was to differentiate the pack from competitors and boost sales. The new pack is apparently meeting the goals.”

Article taken from Packaging Digest, Sept. 2002.

 

 

And another thing: #2

 

Seth Godin is one of my favourite current authors and marketing masters. Paraphrasing a statement in one of his books, Seth says,  ”sometimes safe is the riskiest option of all”.  Here is a video where Seth talks about design and risks.  It is 16 minutes long, but worth the watching. 

Here is a relevant bit of the video transcribed for you:

Design is free when you get to scale. And the people who come up with stuff that’s remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to work for them. Number two: The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. 

Proctor and Gamble knows this, right? The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people. That’s risky. 

The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, be remarkable. And being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring. Very good is average. It doesn’t matter whether you’re making a record album, or you’re an architect, or you have a tract on sociology. If it’s very good, it’s not going to work, because no one’s going to notice it.

http://dotsub.com/static/players/portalplayer.swf?plugins=dotsub&uuid=641b49c0-2967-4075-83ad-6a4893d3d9be&type=video&lang=none

May 10

Losing my sense of boundary…

“No method, no guru, no teacher” – Van Morrison

“You don’t need no gypsy to tell you why” – Gregg Allman

“I just believe…in me” – John Lennon
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I want to lose my sense of boundary.  I do not want to live in a linear fashion any more.  The shit has definitely hit the existential fan for me.

The linear track that has been laid or for us/me…teens, twenties, thirties…weeks, months, years…you must, you do, you’ve done…I don’t like it. This linear thing is all about getting somewhere before you end up dying. This is what we are supposed to do;  I am not and have never been a fan of “supposed to”. I don’t want to live my life like that any more. What I aim to do is to create my own personal meaning/existence in contrast to this general theory.  That being said, I have failed to act on this having not yet made the full-on commitment to do so. 

Why not?  Really, there is no honest reason why except that I haven’t made the choice to do so. This is where some turn pro and some turn tail and run and hide…making choices. Through our choices we become who we are.  The biggest choice I need to make today is to choose that I will break from this linear track and act on my theory/authentic view on how I should be living my life.  In this case, I’m looking for a crutch, a spark to push me to make this choice (this is not a good thing per se, but I need to start somewhere).  So, today I am going to attempt to rewire my circuits in a sensory deprivation tank.

(If you want to know much more about the sensory deprivation tanks, check this out)

A sensory deprivation tank is a light-less, soundproof tank in which subjects float in salty water at skin temperature. Epsom salt
is added to the water in the tank to raise the density of the water
above the density of the human body, so that you float with your face above the water. The ears are submerged
so that hearing is greatly reduced.  When the arms float to the
side, skin sensation is greatly reduced because the air and water are
the same temperature as the skin, and the feeling of a body boundary
fades.

The idea is that you reach a severe state of relaxation after about twenty minutes and then then the theta brainwaves start to take over. Theta brainwaves are found in the brain state of REM sleep (dreams), hypnosis, lucid dreaming, and the barely conscious state just before sleeping.  This range of brainwaves has been associated with reports of relaxed, meditative, and creative states. You retain consciousness but access subconscious thoughts.

I know this is not a magic tank where I will emerge an all-knowing, all-seeing being. The reason I am doing it is, a) I am curious about it and what it is like and, b) I do want to start to filter out a lot of the clutter in my thought process and I think this might be a starting point to doing it on an ongoing basis.  My expectations are that I will have the opportunity to put everything on pause and start to find the focus perspective necessary to make the right choices in order to live the existence that I want.

“Existence that I want”.  What is it that I mean by that?  A linear life…for me…is a life lived on a timeline where too much dependence on my past limits my current choices, thus implicating my future. I am trying to live a non-linear life where I sit in the centre of my existence and all of my experiences, values, influences hover around me.  At any time I can theoretically pluck them out and use them to make the right choices that lead me in the right direction.  This way my choices are not contingent on a past that dictates “what I am to do next”.   Ultimately I want my choices to be made based on the opportunities at hand and where they could lead me and not on the requirements of the situation that forces me to make a decision (not necessarily the right one).

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My choices are something (the only thing?) I can can actually control. If I am “born here and will die here against my will” as Dylan puts it, in between that space, I alone alone can create an existence that I aspire to have (and I have lofty personal goals) through making choices (that I will be solely responsible for) based on personal values and experiences, and not, necessarily, timelines.

On to the tank…

p.s. about three years ago I wrote an essay that touched on existential themes. Looking back it was a good if not naive effort to start to form a personal philosophy something I was/am interested in: choices>responsibility>freedom.  Have a read if you are interested:

Live Free or Die Unfettered Freedom.pdf
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