The economy has changed purchase patterns at C-stores, and marketers should determine seek opportunities to introduce new or repackaged products.

Mintel lists 10 areas in which shoppers will see some new ideas in consumer products, some of them familiar. That could bode well for package design, too.

Yet another food-related consumer packaged goods company sees opportunity for new sales by adopting the single-serve packaging format, thereby increasing portability.

The recession has hit cheese sales hard, but how about refocusing marketing efforts on single-serve snack packaging? The same idea revitalized soup sales.

Wal-Mart is one retailer that's recapturing its own stores by being creative inside the box, says Patrick Sbarra, President of New Creature, an in-store marketing design company. Sbarra told an audience at the HBA Global Expo earlier this month in New York City that the nearly $400 billion retailing giant has begun a gradual program to clean up its main aisles and improve sight lines, and brand marketers should be prepared to adjust.

If packaging is essential in marketing your brand, pay attention to shape as you attend trade shows and conferences this fall. Designers who focus on structural packaging form have long considered their craft something of a "dark art," compared with the perceived sexier world of colors and graphics, but that is evolving.

Food marketers in more categories are looking for ways to intensify their package's graphics to heighten visibility.

Take a look around your product category for the true leaders.

What are the differences in packaging design between the U.S. and Europe?

Lexus promo mailer has the high-end touch

With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.

—Henri Matisse

Editor's note: With this issue, we welcome Robert Croft, a design industry veteran with a gift for seeing "what could be," and the ability to translate those ideas into workable, visual packaging concepts. His What if... columns will publish periodically in Shelf Impact!'s e-newsletter and in printed inserts of Shelf Impact! in Packaging World magazine.

White-coated aluminum cans provide the canvas for labels with glitzy graffiti graphics that introduce AriZona Beverages' All City NRG green-tea-based, pomegranate-juice-flavored energy drinks.

Sustainability is driving the excess from packaging materials, energy use, and waste. The challenge for brand owners will be to improve product protection and shelf impact while also using materials and technologies that lessen packaging's environmental impact.

Sometimes, insightful breakthroughs originate from unlikely places. I was reminded of that while listening to Barbara Jirka speak at a conference in Boston last week. Jirka is Channel Marketing Manager for Tyson Foods, and she was presenting at the Kid Power Food and Beverage conference about marketing healthful foods to kids and moms.

High-volume retailers are beginning to operate as brands rather than places, and this shift is profoundly impacting consumer packaged goods.

Editor’s note: Global Package Gallery is a brand new Web site developed by Shelf Impact! The growing gallery currently contains more than 4,200 high-resolution package images from 37 countries, arranged by product category. Early subscribers include Unilever, Avon, Whole Foods, and a number of package design firms. But rather than us tell you about the gallery, we asked a real designer to review it. Here's what Kevin Saladyga had to say.

Wonder Tablitz Corp., Walpole, MA, is performing a sustainability sleight of hand with a new line of household cleaning and deodorizing products that yields 96 oz of liquid product per each empty 32-oz bottle sold. The Wonder Tablitz™ line of four cleaning solutions relies on the company's patented effervescent-tablet technology and a custom spray bottle that holds tablet refills to provide consumers with an environmentally friendly and effective cleaning system, the company says.

Hispanics have purchasing power of $860 billion, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, and all I get on my package is the translation of the words “black beans” to frijoles negros?

The promise of smart packaging has always been impressive. Now, at last, some pretty intriguing commercial applications are starting to surface. There's More. Click to continue reading "Smart packaging—lessons in enhanced functionality"

For some homeowners, their bar is becoming a status symbol. They're expressing interest in wine and spirits bottles that not only perform the functional task of holding a beverage, but that double as decorative pieces.

A closer look at the newest trends in today's packaging.

With consumer markets fragmenting into ever-smaller niches, the need to understand who your consumers are and what motivates them to purchase has never been more important. You can learn about the latest research and strategy development approaches in use today at the ninth annual Proof: Market Research & Strategy Development for Package Design conference.

In order to be truly effective, packaging has to literally deliver the heart and soul of the brand in a way that forges strong, emotive connections with the consumer. The days of delivering a hierarchy of features and benefits on packaging in a dry manner, sans emotion, are over. But where do emotive cues come from?

Successfully integrating structural and graphic branding has proved challenging for many product manufacturers. “Do we start with graphics branding and then create a structure around it, or do we create a structure and then start the graphics exploration afterward?” This question is commonly asked at the beginning of the creative process.

Demand is growing globally for health-in-a-bottle products—those sold in daily dose formats on the basis of health claims, as a segment of the umbrella category of products that help maintain intestinal health. Marketers are introducing more health-in-a-bottle products as consumers appear increasingly interested in looking after various aspects of their well-being by consuming a health drink each day.

The package is becoming essential in marketing, and a good brief invites critical thinking earlier from those with packaging savvy.

They’re 16 to 24 years old. They’re brash, mature in life experience, difficult to shock. Collectively, this coming-of-age group within Generation Y is millions of consumers strong, and if your brand doesn’t speak their language, it may fall behind with this group as its spending power grows. Packaging profoundly impacts which brands.

Matt Dudas, a loyal reader of Shelf Impact! and a 17-year veteran in package structure, poses an interesting question. Why, in some product categories, does packaging innovation come only after tragedy strikes, he asks.

Are Universal Design principles incorporated into your brand's package developed process?

The emphasis on convenience drives so many food packaging decisions today, and it may have a greater influence on the packages we see in the future than anything else out there. The following are new examples in the battle for shelf supremacy in convenience packaging:

What really is this thing we call packaging innovation, how is it nourished, and how can it be successfully woven into a company’s approach to package design? Shelf Impact! Asked Elizabeth Head-Fischer, Packaging Design Manager at Texas Instruments; Michael Livolsi, Package Design Consultant formerly with Unilever; and Arno Melchior, Global Packaging Director at Reckitt Benckiser.

SI:How would you define innovation?

Livolsi: In terms of brand plus packag. It must take into account the complete 30-degree branding graphics as well as structure. Paying attention to category cues is important, too

Melchior: The thing without which we lose market share. If your competition moves ahead and you’re still in an outdated-looking package, you’ll definitely be left behind.

SI: Liz, dose senior management give your industrial design group of managers and so forth a lot of leeway in the trial-and error phase of package development?

Head-Fischer: We're given enough leeway. We're not expected to be on target from the get-go. But you have to have sound logic behind the moves you're proposing. And you have to be able to demonstrate that you're guided by sound testing procedures, not only with focus groups but against International Safe Transit Association guidelines and all the subsequent testing procedures and metrics that carry a package through.

SI: Can you name a recently introduced package that you classify as an innovation success?

Livolsi: Unilever's Axe line of men's care products was quite successful in connecting with young males. Their expectations for a product that really delivers an experience are met by a design that is striking, yet the package is user-friendly while managing to showcase both product and package. Clorox is another good example. One key to successful innovation in package design is that ability to hold onto category cues, yet still push ahead of those cues to create some new news. I think Clorox has done this quite effectively with Ultimate Care Premium Bleach. The package almost has a Woolite-like quality to it in the way it conveys notes of gentleness. But with this line extension, they hold onto the credibility of Clorox, yet bring to the package qualities that are gentle. The package suggests clothes will be cleaned in a gentle way.

Melchior: The dual-chamber bottle used for both Spray 'n Wash laundry cleaner and Resolve carpet cleanser. This bottle has two chambers and a complicated dispensing head that mixes the two liquids. As soon as you combine the two liquids, they start to fizz and go to work on stains. The dispensing head we came up with includes five injection-molded plastic parts. It involved 10 injection molds and three or four blow molds.

By Terri Goldstein, Strategy Principal, and Missy Anapolsky, Chief Creative Officer The Goldstein Group

Package design solutions can deliver brands that fulfill consumers’ inmost desires; reaffirm their values or a feeling of achieved aspirational status, a sense of enjoyment, and a growing relationship. These elements satisfy deep emotional needs. Therefore, brands that embody the lifestyle the consumer has, or aspires to, resonate strongly because consumers identify with them at the deepest level.

Where does Disney Consumer Products get the inspiration for its packaging? Sheila Ullery, Health and Beauty Director, mentioned at the HBA Expo in September that Disney creates the image first and then builds products and packaging around it. This approach is in stark contrast to most consumer goods companies, which create the product first, then try to figure out an image to go with it.

Package Design magazine seeks branding and design professionals to vote online to select its annual Makeover Challenge winner. Five teams have re-created new packages and a new brand identity for four SKUs of the Fresh Body Market brand of vegan-certified soap and lotion products.

Here's a worthwhile exercise: Ask yourself and your package design team, "What If?" The challenge is to use great packaging ideas being introduced elsewhere not as a template for your own projects, but as inspiration for what could be for your packaged products. If you had no budget and no limitations, how would you engage shoppers and create shelf space that really grabs a consumer and makes an impact? Here is a list of "What Ifs" to ponder:

Packaging managers from four leading consumer goods companies said during a panel discussion at the “Fuse: Brand Identity & Package Design” conference in April in New York that marketers and designers often work too independently of each other. This results in a creativity gap that can derail effective package development before the process reaches the packaging line.

If there’s a word that’s overused in marketing and design circles when it comes to packaging, the word is “innovative.” I recently had a telephone conversation with Roy Parcels who, as a designer for decades, knows a thing or two about the relative place in history of any purportedly innovative package.

Procter & Gamble Prestige Products is extending the Hugo Boss brand into men’s skin care at Bloomingdale’s stores with Boss Skin, a subbrand of eight products in what Boss Skin Global Marketing Director Marco Parsiegla describes as a “hero pack.”

If you believe in the adage “innovate or die,” you may want to look at personal care products for survival ideas. This “lifestyle” category is very personal to consumers, who are pushing marketers to provide customized packages that seem “just for them” and target consumer niches within the category.

A demographic tidal wave of aging boomers is set to befall consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) and package designers. As a result, you've been reading articles about topics like ease of use, designing for aging consumers' needs and universal design (we outlined universal-design philosophy in the January/February 2006 issue of Shelf Impact!). What techniques are available to help brand managers, marketers, and package designers design and test packages that aging consumers will receive well?

Considering that the venerable bar code’s first commercial packaging application predates the Korean War, one would think the printed zebra stripes are about as cutting-edge as ring-pull tabs on two-piece steel cans.

4C Foods Corp. boosted sales 7% for its 4C brand of seasoned salt-free breadcrumbs by refreshing the canister graphics to help reintroduce the long-time product’s benefits to diet-conscious consumers.

The redesigned canister graphics achieve two important objectives for the Brooklyn, NY-based marketer:

The prepared meals market will grow by 16.5% over the next five years, forecasts Research and Markets, a consultancy. Brand managers who cash in on this trend will be those who understand the consumer drivers and reflect them through packaging as part of a marketing strategy.

Growth will be particularly strong in chilled prepared meals. A Research and Markets study in early 2005 found that 70% of respondents claim that the “unhealthy” features of shelf-stable meals limit their consumption. Some 46% say these meals contain too many additives.

The study found that a growing number of consumers are switching to chilled prepared meals. They perceived that the chilled meals use fresh ingredients, contain fewer additives, and thus are healthier.

“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.