When I was eight I started to work at weekends and during school holidays, delivering fresh, unpasteurised milk from the local farm. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, the packaging design was incredibly sophisticated for a small farmer with 70 cows and a bottling machine.
A rational examination of the design (probably based on a template offered by the bottle supplier) might raise some challenges: “Why all the eggs and chickens? Show me the cows!” But neither I nor my customers got as far as rational; the story of this milk is clearly and eloquently told, through the emotional cues that litter the pack as profusely as the imaginary corn those chickens are pecking at.
What’s more it’s a true story.
All Marketers are Liars*
Here is a very similar story, being told with equal or greater skill from the point of view of the graphic design; look closely and you can even detect traces of rubbing out on the ‘blackboard’. However this story is not true, but a skillfully applied lie. Heinz does not buy from, or otherwise champion the cause of Farmer’s Markets, and few if any of the mushrooms in the cans would recognise a woodland if they saw one. But neither do we expect any of these things, even when faced with this truly convincing piece of design; instead we enjoy the lie, the ‘story’ being told, because we’d like to believe it. So much so, that we can even taste it**.
* Seth Godin said it first ** it’s called Sensation transference
