Links: Colbert Packaging
International Paper
Valéron Strength Films
Brookdale Plastics

When Topps Inc. sought secure packaging for its collector trading cards, it decided on a paperboard-and-film lamination. Topps selected Colbert Packaging’s BlisterGuard® security package.

Film from Valéron Strength Films is laminated to paperboard from International Paper (IP). IP extrusion-coats the inside of the fold-over card for secure heat seals, then Colbert’s Just Pack It plant applies security sensors to the board. After Colbert offset prints the cardstock in four colors, it is sealed to polyvinyl chloride blisters from Brookdale Plastics.

Link: Collotype Labels
Neocork Technologies

Some wine marketers are moving to a playful image to gain distinction, primarily through the label. A recent example is Snob Hill Winery’s Le Snoot brand. An illustration of pigs anchors the label, intertwining both the California wine marketer’s brand image and name. A screened, high-gloss finish makes the illustration “pop” when set against the matte finish portion of the label.

Collotype prints the labels rotary offset in four-color process, plus black. A black synthetic cork from Neocork prevents the closure from drying out.

Club stores and other upscale retailers like unusual or exclusive products. The WaterBall is a package that illustrates the point.

It is being designed for distribution through big-box stores where bottles would be sold off pallets. From the WaterBall International Group, the WaterBall is a blow-molded, PET ball holding 3.3 gallons of water.

Its advantages at retail are its size and shape. It weighs about 28 lbs, compared with 40-plus lbs. for a 5-gallon water jug, and its smaller size may appeal to women. The WaterBall can be produced in either a ribbed or a smooth configuration.

Links: Petro Packaging
Zaunscherb Marketing Inc.
InterPac

Yosha! Enterprises, seeking structural packaging inspiration for liquid mints, found it in the cosmetics aisle. The company’s approach takes two forms: First, a pocket-size foil pouch containing a tube that holds eight gelatin capsules filled with flavored liquid. Second, a “super tube” variety pack containing 15, eight-count tubes.

Zaunscherb Marketing drove the new design. Flex-printed foil pouches come from InterPac. Clear tubes with polypropylene caps from Petro Packaging address retailer demand for more dynamic packaging in category planograms.

Links: Gerresheimer Group

Perfume artist Ulric de Varens debuted Lily Sweet in a stylish flacon, from Gerresheimer. The packaging combines two circular shapes plus a delicate pastel shade of the perfume itself.

These tactics create the perception of a brand with an individual, young, feminine, and modern “personality.”

The body of the glass package resembles a lens with a crescent-shaped shoulder piece of clear Plexiglas. The tailored glass creates a “dance of attractive light reflections” in which the package materials interact. A metallic atomizer completes the design.

Shape helps Evian distinguish bottled water on the store shelf—at $2.50 per unit—in a glass bottle formed as a monolithic ice-like sculpture with a red-tinted PET overcap. The triangular bottle is reminiscent of alpine mountaintops from which Evian water flows.

A division of Landor Associates designed the recyclable bottle, molded of thick glass by an overseas subsidiary of Saint-Gobain Containers. A “clean” front-panel design lets shape tell the brand story, supported only by a “no-label” pressure-sensitive label.

Link: Landor Associates
Saint-Gobain Containers

Links: MeadWestvaco Corp.
Regia HighPack AG

Swiss marketer Chocolat Frey AG achieves prestige in chocolates by leveraging the look and feel of premium, one-side-coated paperboard from MeadWestvaco. The board also protects the marketer’s “large-format,” thin bars from damage. Regia HighPack AG, the converter, offset-prints the board in six to eight colors for more than 15 Chocolat Frey brands.

Chocolat Frey’s Beat Luthi says MeadWestvaco’s Crescendo board provides “an aesthetically pleasing surface, gloss, and good mechanical stability” that signals a quality brand.

The best sales opportunities occur when a marketer can speak one-on-one with customers and change the message frequently.

This is what marketers are doing in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia using a combination of tools whose time may be right in U.S. markets. The tools are packaging and wireless phones, and they leverage the technology known as text messaging.

The results of our first readership survey are in, and it’s encouraging to learn that 92% of you are finding the content in Shelf Impact! to be very to extremely useful. We want to continue to improve. Let us know how at george@packworld.com.

Shelf Impact! found two hidden nuggets amid the responses to our February readership poll. Demographics experts have been advising marketers about the trend toward smaller U.S. households and the related consumer need for portion control. However, just 21% of readers in our survey say that either package size or the impact of smaller households factor into their package development strategy.

Second, we all know about the “graying of America.” Yet, “senior-friendly” was mentioned as a package-development consideration by only 2.5% of survey respondents.

Oh, and by the way, don’t forget to take our monthly readership survey as you exit this month’s e-newsletter. It’s short—we promise!

My name is David, and I am a packaging geek.

For those of us who admit to our addiction, Christmas and Hanukkah present interesting discoveries. I was amazed to see the lengths to which vintners and distillers go to differentiate one chardonnay or vodka from another using shaped bottles, embossed labels, and unique dispensing closures. The bottles and packaging spanned the gamut from absurd to understated.

Somewhere near the north end of understated was where my eyes paused to admire one particular package. I admired this box. It was a drop-front, angled-lid, rigid display, and it occupied a place of honor among the many bottles on the barkeep’s organized and backlit shelves. It was, after all, a “gift” from Bombay Spirits presented to just 1,000 bartenders across the country as a means to promote the premium Bombay Sapphire gin for martinis.

Marketers, brand managers, and package designers who want to learn more about driving brand performance by creating a powerful synergy between marketing strategy and package design are invited to the 9th annual Brand Identity & Package Design conference.

The conference will be April 18-20, 2005, at The Plaza, New York City. It is hosted by the Institute for International Research and supported by Shelf Impact!

Q: How can you identify the brand drivers and uncover the brand assets critical to the pre-packaging process?

A: Uncovering what we call the “enjoyment assets” of a brand becomes the foundation for building a unique visual expression for that brand. Connecting consumers emotionally to a brand is essential. Connecting them to a product through enjoyment is powerful, bringing favorable associations to mind at the point of sale, and motivating purchase. When the brand promise is fulfilled in the consumer’s mind, brand loyalty results.

Even commodity products, which do not “own” enjoyment, can bring differentiating attributes into play. These enhance positive interaction with consumers to create enjoyment within the brand experience.

Peter Harrop sees enormous potential for smart packaging in brand enhancement. As Chairman of IDTechEx, a firm that provides independent analysis on development and application of RFID and smart packaging, Harrop has been following industry trends for the past six years.

Harrop advises marketers to think about “more than simply using the package for its ages-old function of displaying a product, instructing you about it, and protecting it.”

George H. Howell has gone from retail coffee marketing to selecting and roasting unique coffee beans that GHH Select markets under the Terroir coffee brand. Terroir (pronounced terr-war) is a term often used in wines to denote the soil of a particular growing region, each with its own geological and climatic conditions.

Working with the package designer, Howell reflects the origin of his beans—created in very small quantities—through packaging for his brand that’s inspired by designs in the wine aisle. The brand is available in specialty stores, some Whole Foods stores, and from GHH Select’s Web site.

To highlight a bean’s terroir, each front label is the “star” of the package. It includes a photograph representing the farm where that bean grew. Quik Stik/Xygraphics prints the full-color, hand-applied labels.

“Unlike most packaging, our logo is tiny on our package,” says GHH Select General Manager Mark Bishop. “We wanted our labels to resemble those of wine bottles, to tie in with our brand name.”

Con Agra Foods converted its prepared pasta dishes to easy-open ends on metal cans in late summer 2003, and dollar sales rose 11.2% in the six months after the launch—at the same time that category-wide sales fell 6.8%.

A year later, Con Agra’s share of the single-serve prepared pasta category had increased from 59% to 64%. What’s the lesson in this example? Convenience packaging sells.

To differentiate your brand from the competition, it is best to visually “own” the dimension—it could be “attitude”—that ties most directly to the end benefit, such as ease-of-use or sophistication.

— Scott Young, President, Perception Research Services

Share your marketing insights with your peers. Contact Jim George, 630/897-7158 or george@packworld.com.

If your product is small in size, Arlene Peltola, Innovations Marketing Manager at Hershey Foods, suggests that you look at pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, “because they are great for small-item presentation.”

Speaking at the recent Package Design 2005 conference, Peltola said that’s just what Hershey did in creating a package for Liquid Ice, in order to leverage a unique product form—liquid crystals—through packaging.

The unique environment that club stores create makes packaging a critical component in any strategy aimed at generating sales in these outlets. Factors that must be considered include these:

• Pallets need enough pizzazz to sell brands in a drab merchandising environment where packaging is often the only selling tool.

• Marketers must respond to cost pressures to meet retailer price points.

At BJ’s Wholesale Club, sales of existing products increased 30% in the first year after the packaging was redesigned under the umbrella of BJ’s own private-label consumer brand, Berkley & Jensen. Private-label products now account for 6.5% of the company’s total sales.

BJ’s success, one result of its evolving positioning strategy, demonstrates that sales increases are possible—including for private-label brands—when strategic package design reflects the corporate marketing objective.

Operating on the East Coast and in the Southeast, BJ’s markets products to both consumers and business customers. But its core focus is on consumer offerings and its Berkley & Jensen line. This positioning differentiates BJ’s in the highly competitive warehouse club industry.

“One of the most creative states of mind to be working in is the not knowing.” Does this statement scare you? It inspires me, and if it were the creative genesis for more packaging, we’d see less of the connect-the-dots approach to design.

The owner of this statement is Martin Bunce of Tin Horse, a design firm in the United Kingdom. It was the building block of his presentation at the recent Package Design ’05 conference in Clearwater, FL. Bunce believes that because brand marketers and package designers sometimes hesitate to work outside their comfort zones, a lot of bland packaging gets foisted onto the market. In his view, great packaging comes about by:

• Finding inspiration in unconventional places.

• Breaking the rules of marketing.

• Offering an interactive experience that relates to the product and that brings life to the brand.

• Creating a future and expressing it through packaging to bring life back to the present.

Mona Doyle wants brand managers and package designers to know this: The price you pay in goodwill and sales for packaging that consumers perceive as undesirable could get even higher.

Doyle is President of The Consumer Network and her Philadelphia company’s new, 137-page report based on surveys of 475 shoppers across the U.S. finds that many packages still have a long way to go to become ”user friendly.”

Shoppers rated packaging friendliness or unfriendliness—those that are easy to use and understand—in 78 product categories and other classifications. Among the findings:

• Consumers believe the most user-friendly packaging lies in liquid soap and ready-to-eat (pre-cut) fruit.

• They found packaging generally unfriendly in small electronics, athletic supplies, carded capsules, cosmetics, and health-testing kits.

Lowe’s Companies isn’t the first retailer to prod vendors into putting bilingual copy on packages. But its mandate on what to include and how to include it is one of the more comprehensive game plans for adding Spanish to packaging graphics.

Lowe’s is mandating bilingual copy on all consumer packaging it receives as of Sept. 1, 2005. The company devotes 11 pages of guidelines on how to do that in its “Visual Standards Guide—Signage and Packaging Guidelines.”

Consumer packages run from large corrugated cases to plastic bags for individual parts.