Osborne Pike

Welcome to Shelf Life, the blog that reports the stories being told by packaging on the supermarket shelf.

Packaging was famously called ‘The Silent Salesman’ by James Pilditch in his 1961 book of that name, but how does a mute object tell a story at all?

With great ease it turns out, because our brains are wired to tell ourselves a story about everything we come across, as long as we notice it in the first place. This will only happen if the story being told fits both our immediate desire, and our biased view of how the world works.

I will be speaking on this topic at the forthcoming Packaging Innovation show in London on October 6th and 7th. For a free entry ticket click here, but please read the blog first!

Here’s a truly charming design, telling the brand story with wit, appetite appeal, clear variety coding and plenty of impact. In truth it’s really a product story since the Cup-a-Soup ‘brand’ is virtually generic, but perhaps the little Batchelor’s flag saves the day.

I’ve always loved this brand story and also admired the fact that its owners resist the temptation to ‘improve’ it. They clearly understand that they managed to create a near perfect encapsulation of this very popular worldview: ‘Products like these tasted better in the past, when our Grandmothers had time to make them from scratch from fresh ingredients’. Otherwise known as the ‘unspoilt by progress’ story, this is often told but rarely as well or as consistently as here.

The success and subsequent rampant copying of the dorset cereals design aesthetic reveals that they were definitely ‘on to something’.

By any conventional measure of standout this pack has very little, until you realise that it’s all about different worldviews. To devoted buyers of Kellogg’s Special K and Coco Pops this pack is invisible; but to people who might have grown up with Alpen and Jordans, and whose taste in cooking, clothes and interior design has moved on a lot since then, this packaging must have prompted a deep, emotional sigh of relief: “At last, a Muesli that understands me!”

The foil-blocking is a masterstroke, elevating a small, worthy-looking box to the status of a cosmetic. “Why do I buy dorset cereals? Because I’m worth it!”

In Belgium there are dozens of so-called ‘Abbey beers’, many still genuinely brewed by monks as part of their traditional way of life. Others have ‘moved on’ to become part of global brewing empires, but their noble origins live on through the brand story and its design metaphors: medieval scripts, parchment and stained glass windows.

As this type of beer has found broader acceptance the packaging has evolved to compete with more mainstream brands, with no better an example than this new Leffe pack. With its iconic arch providing cathedral-like standout, and a tasteful portrait of monastic lunch in the bottom corner, expect plenty of new converts.

Generally speaking the bigger the ‘food shot’ the less value can be added to the brand story, because the world is not short of good (or good-looking) products, and own-label can copy your pack before you can say ‘quattro formaggio’.

I can’t believe there really is a guy whose name translates as ‘Jack Bakehouse’, but I’m willing to suspend this disbelief in the face of the sheer weight of clichés on this design, and celebrate the story.

In contrast to Mr Bakehouse’s efforts (see previous post), the clichés we’re seeing here don’t tell a coherent story at all. Lovely as it is to see some Scottish scenery, both of these brands are presumably expert in the business of actually smoking the salmon, yet that story remains untold.

A window reveals the product in all its glory, and at least the Smokeyard version looks a bit more organic thanks to the different textures. Inverawe could be a magical place (or even an awesome one), but I’m none the wiser after struggling to navigate this random collection of stripes and boxes.

Juice comes from pressing fruit, but what quality of fruit, exactly how we got the juice out of the fruit, and what we added to it for your benefit, are all viable brand stories. Trying to keep the pure and natural aspect can be a challenge, but when you’re called ‘the fruit lab’ or ‘Fruit&Co’ perhaps that isn’t high on the priority list.

‘Rijp’ (= Ripe to you and me) looks a lot more natural and tells a ‘good taste’ story in more ways that one. Coolbest’s Raw Juice on the other hand seems to be mixing its design metaphors, with a high-tech logo, low-tech paper, and a bottle which has been hacked into shape with a machete. Not a great recipe for something trying to be simple.

I’m not sure how many French consumers know that LU is (very) shorthand for Lefèvre-Utile, a brand with an extremely long and colourful heritage.

In design terms it has long been a simple endorsement of an army of sub-brands, many far more famous than their ‘mother’. But no longer: In the face of an even bigger army of own-label copies, LU has decided to flex its muscles and reverse the brand architecture. This will give advertising a chance to switch the emotional messaging to the mother brand, providing an efficient way to kill several birds with one stone (or at least give them a nasty punch on the beak). As for the packaging, some careful thought on how to look a bit less monolithic is clearly required.

Muller’s redesign achieves its objective of marking out a clear area of the shelf for its large product range.

How many products and what do they do for me? Sorry, you’ll have to work that out for yourself.

The most stylish rule-breaking brand on the street, as seen through the salon window. The name is utterly brilliant, evoking the decadent lifestyle of people who are having a blast, so work can wait. At least in their dreams.

The packs tell this story whilst managing to adopt some highly conformist segmentation and coding. In this they get a lot of help from the cool naming, like ‘Control Freak’, ‘Epic Volume’ and ‘Dumb Blonde’; God, I’m so self-effacingly hip.