Welcome to Issue 1 of Shelf Life, the blog which reports brand stories from the front line – on the supermarket shelf.
No photoshop-enhanced beauty shots, just brands fighting to get our attention in the crowded, loud and sometimes untidy places we go shopping.
Sad to see it’s time to say goodbye to the delightfully wacky Ragu jar made from stacked tomatoes. It’s done some sterling work, but with the premium end of pasta sauces overrun with celebrity chef recipes, the brand has clearly decided to go all basic and value for money, taking the prize for the biggest increase in logo size at the same time.
Could it be co-incidence that over in The Netherlands, fellow Unilever brand Calvé has also undergone the ‘basic’ treatment. Despite the timeless authority of the wonderful badge, the throwing together of an ugly collection of rag-tag typefaces and shapes below it does nothing for the desired brand story of ‘why risk Calvé quality for a few cents less?’
Not a new design but fast becoming a classic (cue: less good design comes out next week).
The glass image looks so real I can hear it clinking. With the split design and clean white field it oozes freshness and quality, all held together with a distinctive badge shape and logo.
The clever bit is that it works just as well on the bottom shelf of the supermarket as it does at eye-level. Cheers!
When Tango first found its story in the early 90′s, it was a cause for celebration because suddenly there was actually something to say about a non-Cola carbonate. Coke vs Pepsi is one of the archetypal battles between the establishment and the challenger, but until Tango re-invented itself orange carbonates only really had Fanta, with its rather apologetic packaging that suggested it had once met an orange but had not actually engaged with it.
When new advertising and packaging showed us what it was like to be ‘tangoed’ we got the message, and flocked to the new coolest drink on the (tower) block.
After the hype faded Tango compromised its design language and limped along for years in the shadows of its rejuvenated American rival, but this latest design restores its grungy teen appeal. Spotting this half-full can on the pavement I laughed out loud at the irony of the perfect ‘product placement’.
Spending a lot of time in both UK and Dutch supermarkets, it was great to see the highly effective yoghurt bucket of ‘de Zuivelhoeve’ in Waitrose last year. The name translates roughly as ‘the dairy farmstead’ but to all intents and purposes it’s unpronounceable to Brits.
Clearly the bucket needed a bit of help from the graphic side to complete the story in export markets. So we’ve now got legible typography, some big clear fruit drawings, and a new brand name: ‘Twekkelo’. Glad they cleared that one up then.
(If you really want to know, it’s named after a rural region in the far east of The Netherlands).
Whilst I can’t even begin to imagine the target group for marketers of Ostrich eggs, I can say with confidence that they deserve a better story than either of these.
Choose from: “we couldn’t be bothered to package it” or “purveyors of ostrich eggs to a minor Royal”. Come on, show me that weird bird, or tell me how BIG it is, or how the hell to open it!!!
Thanks to Wouter for giving me the headline, referring to the responsibility of brand leaders to help their customers sell more stuff, including Private Label.
Consumer insight, leading to accurate segmentation and innovation (in both product and packaging) is the key; so when the most interesting stuff on shelf is from Private Label (like these great little Spice ‘potjes’ from Albert Heijn), it’s often a sign that the Captain is ‘missing in inaction’.
James Who’s? Ah, but that’s the fun of it, now we have to work out which is old and which is new. Assuming that designs tend to get better (not always true as we shall see), then for me it’s the one which helps me to tell myself the best story about why I should buy it. Is it me or am I getting a bit of a ‘Twilight’ groove here? Sold!
You’ve tasted the soups, drunk the coffees (and the teas), and now you can wake up in Marrakech and go to bed later the same day in Madagascar. The lure of exotic scents and tastes is a tried and trusted product story that will always endure, even when its design rarely gets beyond the postcard cliché. But what of the brand story here? Palmolive is a familiar and trusted brand and one half of a giant corporation’s name. I can’t help thinking it could be so much more.