One medium reaches 100% of your customers. Why are you neglecting it?
“Investment in design will be the best media buy you will ever make. Packaging is your main communication channel.” These words uttered by Brett Donahay at the Nordic Food Branding 2017 summit organised by Kuudes stuck in my mind. Since then I have been wondering: why do so few brands take full advantage of packaging design?
There are thousands of products in an ordinary supermarket but we buy only a tiny fraction of them. Which brands make it onto your personal list is entirely up to you but the role of packaging cannot be overestimated.
Of course you must also have a fine product and superb design, no doubt about that. But if one key element, like packaging, is lagging behind, you are not making use of the whole potential.
All too often, there’s a mindset that “good products sell themselves”. Newsflash: quite rarely they do.
It’s not only a matter of looking good or standing out from all the other products on the shelf. It’s a matter of communication — how a brand can use packaging smartly to reach hard-core fans as well as new acquaintances and deliver a message. These companies know what they are doing — but for quite different reasons.
Oatly — a revolutionary message with a witty tone of voice
This maker of vegan, oat-based products is a hero brand for many, and for good reason. Oatly doesn’t do marketing based on product qualities with taglines like “Use it like milk” or “Easy and effortless”. Instead, they are agitating people to join the “Post-milk generation” resistance. They have a message and it’s a big one. A world-changing one. And yes, it’s just a product you can put in your coffee instead of cow’s milk.
And they want everyone to join their revolution. Every single piece of Oatly packaging will have their vision of the future written on it with a distinguishable, chatty tone of voice. You no longer nail your declaration to a church door or hand out leaflets, you print it on a milk carton.
Gårdschips — a simple solution for demonstrating quality
If I had to name one guilty pleasure of mine, it would have to be potato crisps. I could live on these salty, artery-clogging, deep-fried pieces of heaven for the rest of my life. And it’s not just your basic 90s snacks anymore; artisan crisps have been around for some time. At first, it was easy to differentiate from mass-produced rivals, such as Pringles. But after several brands entered the market, retaking the position of the quality choice has become more and more difficult.
Gårdschips did something simple but very clever. They deployed the front of the bag to communicate the origins of the product. You see the variety of the potato, the name of the farmer and even the map coordinates of the field. And what’s best, it has the name of the “chipsmästare”, the crisp master. How cool is that? You get the sense of a hand-made quality product that has a story and real people behind it. And all this by communicating some basic facts about the product. Clever.
Poilu — boring products can make you smile
Well, what can you say? Just look at it! Paintbrushes are as sexy as toilet paper. But Poilu has made their products fun, which differentiates them completely from all other brush makers. There’s even a functional side to the packaging: it combines a large brush with a smaller one that can be used for finishing touches.
Sudden Coffee — absolutely instagrammable
Another keynote speaker at Nordic Food Branding 2017, Kalle Freese, presented his latest venture: the Silicon Valley-based instant coffee start-up Sudden Coffee. When you think of instant coffee, a nice quality brew hardly comes to mind. So there’s a huge image problem to tackle.
Sudden Coffee delivers coffee powder in test tubes inside a nice little pouch. This exceptional packaging method calls you to grab your phone and take a photo of the tube alongside a coffee cup and post it on Instagram. The communication angle here is much more subtle, but by rethinking its packaging, Sudden Coffee indicates that they have also reconsidered instant coffee.
Arla — for all generations
The last example is our own work, the Kuudes design for Arla Makukaverit, a flavoured milk drink for children. We studied the joint purchase decisions of parents and their children and identified a child’s need for play and their parents’ need for information. How can one packaging attract both parent and child?
The packaging concept highlights fun children’s characters — top halves and bottom halves — just like a children’s flip book. Kids can put the packages together in weird and wonderful combinations. And the illustrations by Matti Pikkujämsä are just irresistible. The low sugar, no preservatives message was subtly integrated for the attention of parents. Different messages for different generations can live side by side.
What can we learn from these brands? The cases are quite different but there are also similarities:
- All of them have detected a need to communicate something that differentiates them from the competition and have acted upon it. It’s not just being unusual for the sake of it: it’s going the extra mile to deliver the message.
- They all surprise us. They can rethink the whole packaging, as Sudden Coffee and Poilu did, or they can be like Gårdschips and just use the product information in a well thought-out manner.
Do your products communicate something more than just the visual guidelines of your brand?
Got an idea? Let’s continue the discusson! Tweet about this post and tag @mattilehto @kuudeskerros.
