Blister-corrugated package provides security and a 'neat' appearance.

Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. is going “eco-friendly” with packaging for its first products at Sam’s Club. The Irvine, CA-based company uses Winterborne’s EnviroShell™ packaging for a trio of memory storage devices.

EnviroShell is a hybrid blister-corrugated package made from 65% recycled materials, including 50% post-consumer content. The packaging uses a combination of corrugated to carry graphics and clear RPET (recycled polyester) to display the product.

A recycled polyester blister is sandwiched and heat-sealed between the folded E-flute corrugated while a lamination of four-color, offset-printed 80# paper carries the colorful graphics.

Contract packager Winterborne developed materials and equipment technology to seal the corrugated material together at certain points around the central blister. The corrugated is also sealed along the edges for an atypically neat appearance and to improve package security by making it difficult to peel the layers apart, according to Winterborne. Per Sam’s Club’s request, “This is a package that takes environmental impact into account. We are using this instead of standard polyvinyl chloride clamshell packaging,” says Tom Gehrich, Toshiba’s Director of Memory Sales.

Pepsico has achieved sales growth of 35% to 50% in some countries for its Gatorade brand with a new global line of branded structural bottles. Key is that the beverage containers reflect an innovative, consistent brand image within the constraints—varying sizes and processes—required by different markets throughout the world.

    Pepsico approached structural package design firm 4sight inc. with this challenge for Gatorade packaging: Create a global line of custom-branded structural PET and glass bottles based on a single archetypal shape.

    4sight conducted research on both Gatorade and beverages as a whole in homes and on athletic fields across the United States.  Researchers found that consumers view and use Gatorade more as a piece of sports equipment than a beverage—an essential part of their workout routine. Use of the bottle is very personal, and the bottle carries associations with grabbing, holding, and gulping.  

     These insights drove the bottle design, leading to a structural branding concept that communicates the brand’s equities through form, function, and aesthetics. The design can be adapted to different packaging materials and filling processes, in the sizes that each market requires.

A significant direction for high-volume retailers is the move to supercenters. Michigan-based Meijer claims to be the inventor of the supercenter concept, and increased competition from other retailers led it to revamp its private-label packaging.

One tactic was to add a top-tier line to its private label offerings. “Adding the second tier of private-label is one of the directions you are seeing at retail now,” says consultant Mike Richmond of Packaging & Technology Integrated Solutions (PTIS).

“The new Meijer Gold line is an execution of that strategy. It projects a great upscale look with label graphics in categories such as salad dressings and coffee,” Richmond says. “Package graphics rely on a gold-colored band across labels and the Meijer Gold brand in script on the label. This contrasts with the traditional Meijer flag on products.”

The raved-about Starbucks Coffee Liqueur bottle design reflects Starbucks' and Jim Beam's reputations as sophisticated brands.

Much ado has been made over the stunning glass container introduced in 2005 that made Starbucks Coffee Liqueur the top seller in the category and made the brown-bottle design a unanimous winner in the Glass Packaging Institute’s Clear Choice Awards program. But not so well known are the factors that prompted that success.

It was another case of knowing your consumer—how they shop and the visual and cognitive cues that prompt them to buy. Ryan Little, Managing Director/Creative at Lipson Alport Glass & Associates, uses the term “emotive resonance” in describing the notion of satiating consumer desires, and he explained its place in the design for Starbucks Coffee Liqueur at the Package Design 06 conference Jan. 31.

Starbucks coffee is close to achieving market maturity. However, its consumer base remains fanatically loyal to the product, and the company estimates the coffee brand’s value at $16.2 billion, more than two-thirds of the value of the whole company. Little says that marketers at Starbucks faced this challenge: How do you continue to grow a brand that’s saturated and take it in new directions?

Few retailers have more varied requirements, and packagers need to understand them.

Packaging for club stores and other high-volume retailers is getting more complex as retailers compete for market share. They see packaging as a weapon, and they often ask for packaging that is exclusive to them. Packagers respond with a range of solutions, from structural innovation in secondary packaging to graphic solutions on primary containers.

    Based in Atlanta, Wilpak is a contract packager that does a lot of club store packaging. Wilpak General Manager Tom Taylor suggests that packagers work with a standard set of cases or trays and build variations around them, avoiding the need for extensive testing on each variation.

    “You don’t want to have to validate every pallet. If you have a standard display tray, and it has gone through the testing, you don’t have to go through all that again,” he says. “You ultimately reduce your costs with larger order quantities. You help your bottom line by minimizing those costs.”

    An example comes in a club store display tray from Clorox. The tray’s innovative structural design allows it to be erected by machine. Says Randy Wood of Clorox, “It gives us a 40% reduction in the amount of corrugated compared to manually erected trays of the equivalent size. It doesn’t have quite the stacking strength of other cases, but we add heavy corner posts on pallets so we can stack them.”

    The trays also deliver merchandising advantages in club stores. “The pallet is four-side-shoppable,” Wood says.

    The trays come in three different sizes that allow patterns of six, seven, or eight trays per tier, depending on the size of the primary packages. Trays are modular, and different pallet configurations have been through pre-shipment testing. When a new product goes in a pre-tested pallet configuration, Clorox doesn’t have to do additional testing. “That drastically improves speed-to-market for the products,” Wood emphasizes.

Retailer merchandising strategies mean that successful packaging has to go beyond cost-cutting; it must sell brands. Tammy Cahill, Director of Retail Activation for LPK, a Cincinnati design firm, advises to be aware of “treasure hunt” merchandising tactics. Retailers who use this tactic frequently change store arrangements and special offers. An effective strategy requires using all packaging components.

A club store pack for Procter & Gamble’s Olay brand is one example. Corrugated trays deliver a selling message. A display LPK created for Olay includes the brand name on the tray’s lip along with the tag line, “Love the skin you’re in.” The word “Bonus,” printed on the tray lip, stresses value. A die cut adds shape by breaking the tray’s straight, rectangular lines.

Read on for Jim Peters’ additional analysis of high-volume-retailer packaging.

The good-for-you message is proving to be a strong purchase motivator in food products, and ACH Food companies joins the parade with Mazola Pure. The package design, on a aluminum aerosol container from CCL Container, conveys the product attributes—pure aroma and taste.

Packaging in the cooking oil aisle has evolved little in recent years, but this package gives both the brand and the category a shot in the arm with a shapely aluminum container, nozzle, and lightly tinted cap. Bob Larkin, Manager of Packaging Development, says the package’s clean design and pearl finish communicate the taste, aroma, and product expectation.

The design contrasts the category’s conventional steel, three-piece, cylindrical-shaped cans.

Distinctive touches on arched carton covers for Godiva Chocolatier’s Platinum chocolates harken on the brand’s iconic horse-riding figurehead. The gold-stamped figurehead is the center of attention on the carton’s minimalist yet elegant design.

The figurehead is embossed on a special paper from McLean Packaging that’s wrapped around the lid. The dark-chocolate-color carton base, from Bennington Paperboard Co., offers a hint of what awaits inside the carton.

The dark chocolate color extends to the plastic tray inside the carton. The tray is thermoformed into a grid of cavities nesting each chocolate. The grid pattern breaks Godiva’s usual scheme, which has been trays of round or triangular cavities to match the shape of each candy piece.

Club stores have boosted interest in multipacks, and that trend is expanding into more retail channels and product categories. One recent example is a new Fridge Pack of single-serve bottles from Korbel Champagne Cellars, Guerinville, CA.

The package contains six 187-mL glass bottles of Korbel California Champagne. They are nested in a six-by-one pattern in a carton of 22-pt wet-strength paperboard from Graphic Packaging.

At 2 1/2² wide, the package lets consumers keep individual bottles cold in the refrigerator.

A key package feature—new to the category—is detailed opening instructions on the back panel. The instructions include icons that say, “refrigerate,” “pull to open,” and “pop off cap.”

Shell Lubricants has about 45,000 “registrants”—patents, trademarks, etc.,—on file, two-thirds of them in consumer products. Dena Ladner is responsible for much of the packaging that incorporates those marks across Shell’s consumer product lines.

As Manager of North American Lubricants Innovation/D-I-Y Packaging, part of Ladner’s job includes keeping current on the ins and outs of intellectual property law and incorporating the proper ownership protections into Shell’s product and packaging, including design. At the recent Package Design 06 conference in Clearwater Beach, FL, Ladner passed along the following tips for protecting what comes out of the creative design process at consumer packaged goods companies:

1. Industrial design must be “uniquely attractive” and registered to qualify for legal protection. Protection lasts for up to five years, but can be extended another 15 years. In some countries, the design can be protected as a work of art.

2. Unless an agreement exists that stipulates ownership of agency-created work, the law stipulates that the creator owns the design.

3. Sometimes, in commissioning a new universal design for a package, an invention is created. To assure the most stringent protection of any inventions, the brand owner should consider applying for a patent, which lasts for up to 20 years. To qualify for a patent, the invention must be new, technically useful, but “not obvious.”

4. Trademarks are an effective tactic for distinguishing products. When a trademark is changed, the new one must be registered. “Invent the strongest word you can,” Ladner advises.

5. Assure that all employees and contractors have contracts that address their obligations pertaining to ownership and confidentiality in matters of intellectual property.

6. Assign someone to handle all confidential information, conduct due diligence, and conduct intellectual property reviews.

7. Work with your legal department every step of the way. “You don’t want to leave risk on the table because you weren’t careful,” Ladner says. “Make sure all patents have been filed, all agreements have been filled, and then do an annual review of your registrations.”

One consequence of failing to renew registrations is loss of product name ownership, Ladner says. The product names become generic.

“Shell Lubricants is a large company. We are always looking for opportunities, such as competitors failing to renew a registration,” she adds. On the other hand, she adds, “Frequently, people don’t know when they’re infringing on patents, and it’s your obligation to tell them when they are.”

In January, Shelf Impact! asked readers this question: “What are the three most important challenges facing your packaging team in 2006?” Fifty-seven of you responded, and following are the most frequently cited answers.     

     “We are searching the Internet to find alternative resin suppliers.”

    “Conducting focus groups and meeting with new packaging designers.”

    “Lean-techniques training.”

Flat plastic pouch turns into a decorative and sturdy vase when filled with water.

Only a packaging geek finds—and then actually purchases—interesting packaging in an art museum gift shop. A recent pilgrimage to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City left me bored to tears, but I struck package design pay dirt in the gift shop.

    D-Bros, a Tokyo-based designer/creator of “products for living,” utilized a polyester/polyamide/polyethylene lamination to create a utilitarian stand-up pouch flower vase, named Hope Forever Blossoming. Designers Ryosuke Uehara and Yoshio Watanabe capitalized on the refractive properties of light through translucent material and water to take advantage of cross-cross, gravure-printed patterns that create an optical illusion of depth and clarity when filled with water.

    Amazing how five cents worth of flexible packaging material and fractions of a cent worth of ink can be converted into a sticker price of $24.99. But with two pouch vases to a packet, it was a bargain at any price. Brilliant. And the PET container is crystal clear hand-blown glass.

The Institute for International Research (IIR) has announced additional speakers for its 10th annual Brand Identity & Package Design conference April 24-26, 2006, at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City.

Chris Hacker, Corporate Vice President, Design & Design Strategy at Johnson & Johnson, will speak on the topic “Sustainable ‘Green’ Design: How To Make Great Designs And Protect The Planet While You’re At It.”

Katie Connolly, Director of Marketing and Packaging Innovation at Frito Lay North America, and Diane Fritz, Visual Properties and Packaging Manager at Nestlè USA, will participate in the interactive panel discussion “Bridging The Gap Between Strategy And Creative.”

These marketing and packaging professionals will join speakers from Target Stores, Method Home Care, Nike, General Mills, and Kimberly-Clark at the conference, which is targeted at decision-makers in the branding and marketing impact of packaging. Shelf Impact! once again will be a supporter of the conference.

IIR has also announced two pre-conference design and creative workshops, which will be held on April 24.
To register for the conference, call 888/670-8200 or e-mail register@iirusa.com.

Q: “What is changing in the design landscape, and where can we get inspiration for better package designs?”

—asked at the Package Design 06 conference in January in Clearwater Beach, FL.

A: Consumer product companies are paying a lot more attention to research. Often, we’re finding that it’s already been done by the time they talk to us, the design firm. But in the process, they’ve also already reached some conclusions that we don’t necessarily agree with.

If they already know what they want and they just want us, the package designer, to execute it, that usually doesn’t work out too well.

It’s good to see product companies doing scientific research, but we see it sometimes being used the wrong way. My advice is to use it, but do research wisely.

In Spain and France, Heinz UK adds a twist in single-serve soup packaging with barrier plastic cups whose ribbed side panels help the container resist deformation during thermal processing of the packaged soup, and provide insulation.

The cup structure is designed to tolerate thermal processing/commercial sterilization temperatures (about 248 degrees F retort conditions) that render the soups shelf-stable and provide about 12 months of shelf life. The retortable, microwaveable, easy-open cups are developed by EDV Packaging.

The use of PET is growing in cosmetics and personal care packaging. Some marketers are coming to believe that the resin enhances a packaging aesthetic appeal, especially in transparent containers that enable consumers to see the product.

Such is the case for Haal Verpakkingen, a Dutch marketer of personal care products. It markets liquid soap in a transparent, 300-mL extrusion blow-molded PET dispenser. RPC Verpackungen Kutenhholz produces the stylish dispenser.

The clarity of the PET provides a view of the dispenser pump while also adding depth to the graphic design on the container. The overall effect is multidimensional, heightening perceptions of a quality product.

Kimberly-Clark de Mexico says its new 50-unit “cup of tissues” is selling in stores at a price nearly 40% higher than what a consumer pays for a conventional 50-unit carton of tissues.

The new package is a paperboard convolute wound canister from Sonoco. A seamed-on steel bottom and a friction-fit thermoformed polystyrene overcap also make this package a head-turner. Graphics are delivered on a paper label printed offset in six colors. A slit in the center of the lid provides the dispensing mechanism.

The container’s 1.8 x 6.7 size adds in the portability benefit.

After wandering through the visual clutter in Wal-Mart recently, I borrow architect Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” principal. Store shelves offer plenty of opportunity to “break through the noise with quiet” by working toward package designs that are subtle yet sophisticated.

Sophistication has a certain “je ne sais quoi,” poorly translated to mean, “I don’t know what it is that is so special about that, but something definitely is.” It creates an allure that might not be visible immediately; perhaps it’s slightly hidden behind layers. It’s a design whose intrigue invites the consumer to peruse, try, and hopefully appreciate. Following are some principles to guide your design of packaging that subtly welcomes consumers to your brand’s sophistication.

Sophistication is about attention to detail. Not only do all the components work faultlessly, but there is also a place for every detail and every detail is in its place. Sophisticated packaging stands out. Cosmetic lines such as Shiseido create a very distinct and consistent family appearance. Each mascara, lipstick, and compact is precisely engineered and designed to communicate and deliver something different from the other.

I’ve had several recent conversations with managers at companies that market consumer products. In one form or another, they all basically asked the same question, namely, “Is any real packaging innovation occurring out there?”

They have plenty of company in that search.

Over the last few years, savvy companies have begun to figure out that long-term profits will elude them if they continue to cut costs within their walls. They’ve wrung out just about all the internal fat that is possible and are now shifting focus to external cost-cutting.

But in this era of continued belt tightening, the question remains: is any real packaging innovation occurring? In at least one case, the answer is yes. Read in this issue of Shelf Impact! how Pepsico created a global packaging framework for its Gatorade brand that is increasing sales.

A new genre of packaging is challenging traditional cans and bottles for visual supremacy in flavored alcoholic beverages (FABs). Tubes and pouches are injecting “hip” into the category, reports Mintel’s Global New Products Database.

Following are three recent examples that reflect the leading edge of this trend:

• In Austria, Wenger Erzeugungs & Handels has introduced Go Wodka, a vodka-based drink of 4% alcohol-by-volume, in 200-mL metal tubes. The tubes feature shades of red or green to convey that the user is contemporary and sociable. The lemon-flavored drinks contain more caffeine than other FAB products.

The nature of “convenience” is changing; in the consumer’s mind, “quick and easy” is no longer enough, and the challenges that brings for convenience products will also have ramifications in packaging.

That is the conclusion of a new study from Information Resources Inc. (IRI). The market research firm pointed to an underlying shift in demographics as one principal driver of the trend.

The market for convenience products remains strong, IRI says. The challenge is for brand managers and retailers across all categories to identify how their target consumers’ needs are changing and what additional benefits beyond convenience have become requirements as a condition of purchase.

On-the-go, and easy-to-use packaging has become prevalent over the last five years in snacks and, more recently, ready-to-serve meals that also carry a message of “better-for-you.” Personal care may be the next big arena for convenience packaging as more time-pressed consumers engage in on-the-go grooming, the report concludes.