In This Issue

Premium, with a taste of whimsy, clarifies brownies brand “When I met Cindy Gombert, principal of Lunabrand Design Group, we were actively looking to target new demographics that would allow us to significantly expand our market and drive new revenue,” says Eileen Spitalny, co-founder of Fairytale Brownies, Phoenix, AZ.

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How ethnography helped create a better caulk package

By Rick Lingle, Packaging World

GE Caulk Singles are 1.25-oz "unit dose" stand-up pouches designed to make the caulking experience totally convenient and mess-free.

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Momentive Performance Materials Marketing Director Anita Mooy says she relied on ethnographic research conducted by Ideo for this breakthrough packaged-product introduction. As a result, she has become passionate about behavioral studies as an essential tool to help guide product and package development. Mooy believes ethnography is a far richer resource for design than focus groups.

The bar was set high from the beginning when Momentive set out to develop a disruptive, category-changing product and package.

“Our focus was to create revolutionary innovation vs. evolutionary,” Mooy says. “By definition, that’s attracting new markets, new channels of distribution, and new users.”

That led to a “rigorous” three-year research-and-development timetable that took the creative team into the field, where real people use caulk in the real world.

“We went to consumers and residential contractors and professional painters, people who use caulks and sealants in all sorts of ways, and spent an enormous amount of time with them,” explains Mooy. “We watched how they used caulk for home fix-ups, spent time on job sites, and traveled to the store with them. Basically, we lived with them to watch and understand how they behaved and how they used the product, what was important and what wasn’t.”

Mooy says that all of that observing and analyzing came together rapidly: “As you synthesize all of those elements of behavioral science research, you come pretty quickly to large themes that run throughout all those audiences. When you study extreme users, people who use caulk all day, every day, and people who may use it once over several years, if you solve both of those groups’ problems, then you also solve the issues for the majority in the middle of the bell curve. And that’s really what we went about studying and trying to figure out, and hopefully, we cracked that latent need in the market.”

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Mooy says the team members distilled the studies to two factors: ease of use and accessibility. And these aspects tied into packaging by improving the downsides associated with using caulk tubes and caulk guns. As a result, the caulk pouch features an E-flute backing that helps consumers to dispense the package’s entire contents as a perfect bead. Consumers can operate the package with one hand, a convenience not possible with a caulk gun.

Interestingly, Mooy compares the breakthrough to thinking of caulk as eggs. “You take them out and use them as you need them, and each one stays fresh and usable until you open that particular one. So it was really a shift in thinking,” she says.

Mooy and her team uncovered much of this data through the behavioral studies.

“I am absolutely passionate that behavioral science will help you create better products and bigger innovation,” Mooy emphasizes. “Otherwise, it’s very difficult to divorce yourself from the internal workings of your company and your perspectives, and really look at it from the perspective of the person who’s going to use this product.”

Premium, with a taste of whimsy, clarifies brownies brand

By Jim George, Editor-in-Chief

“When I met Cindy Gombert, principal of Lunabrand Design Group, we were actively looking to target new demographics that would allow us to significantly expand our market and drive new revenue,” says Eileen Spitalny, co-founder of Fairytale Brownies, Phoenix, AZ.

The challenge in doing so was that the high quality of the company’s namesake Fairytale Brownies, and other products such as coffee, and on-pack messaging didn’t match, consequently obscuring the brand message of a sumptuous, premium product.

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People who were unfamiliar with the product tended to focus on “Brownie,” the brand’s on-pack animated character. Consumers often weren’t familiar with an essential distinctive feature of Fairytale Brownies: The treats have a gooey chocolate, melt-in-your-mouth feel that adults remember from eating brownies during their childhood.

“The essential question we had to answer was how could we keep the mythology of the Brownie character but also bring out the ‘premiumness’ of the chocolate,” Gombert says.

The answer was to create an array of designs on cartons supplied by Fleetwood-Fibre Packaging & Graphics and foil pouches from Belmark. The cartons and pouches include an illustration of an enchanted forest for Brownie, who was restaged as a silhouette character. This approach allows Brownie to complement the rest of the package design. Elsewhere inside and outside the packaging, colorful “occasion” bands, cellophane, and four-color offset printing with a varnish coat project the perception of a high-end brand for the individually wrapped brownies inside each package.

Spitalny says the fairytale motif captures the sense of whimsy and generosity that she and her co-founder, David Kravetz, want to communicate about the brand. It provides inspiration for the company’s name, logo, and tagline, “A Taste of Pure Enchantment,” to appear on the packaging.

Distinctive typography also sells the brand message. Custom fonts evoke the rich and gooey Belgian chocolate “mouth feel” that Fairytale Brownies consumers prize.