For years, the prevailing wisdom was “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Now, for many products, its only about the cover. A New York Times article (by the most appropriately named journalist in the world, Louise Story) provides an excellent overview of this trend noting how marketers like Pepsi, Kleenex and Coors Light are enlivening their packaging with increasing frequency.
“It’s an inexpensive way to really deliver that newness to people’s homes,” said Becky Walter, director for innovation design and testing at Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex, Huggies and other brands. “It’s not like they have to go out and purchase new furniture.”
Evian is among the marketers using packaging to add a sense of luxury to ordinary products — its new “palace bottle” water, for example, is being sold in restaurants and hotels. The bottle has an elegant swanlike neck and sits on a small silver tray. Technology is also driving the changes — like the thermochromatic ink in the Coors label that changes the color of the label’s mountains with the temperature of the beer bottle.
Now ordinarily, Marketing for Good encourages genuine product enhancements as a means of gaining competitive advantage. In packaging, this can mean designing a better pill bottle like the folks at Target did a couple of years ago. Or it can mean turning the ketchup bottle upside down in order to make it easier to use as Heinz has done. But even a sprucing up of the outside can be meaningful. A highly stylized soda bottle offers a brief moment of self-expression and individuality. For the design conscious, a patterned Kleenex box that compliments a particular decor is vastly preferable to a plain gray box.
One of our clients, Panasonic, is taking this idea of self-expression to the electronics world, offering decor-conscious consumers their choice of 12 special color phones online. It used to be that phones were simple considered utilitarian devices that came it in black, white or silver. Not so anymore. A growing group of consumers are seeking just the right color for all the “accessories” in their home from their Kleenex box to their kitchen phone, and Panasonic is capitalizing on this trend.
Marketing for Good is prepared to embrace any product enhancement big or small even if it simply means empowering a consumer’s particular sense of style and self-expression like adding a perfectly matching “moss green” phone to their “moss green” library. So yes, in a new world of self-expression and individuality…this phone’s for you!