CapsuleBlog

Post holiday blues

Is anyone else suffering from a bad case of post-Festivus blues? Now that the tree is wilting, the once pristine cookies are gathering mold and the anticipation has fizzled, it's really tough to get back into the swing of things. The worst time, though, is yet to come - right now, you see, we still have New Year's Eve (and another day off) in our midst. You just wait til this time next week.

In the meantime, though, what did you get for Christmas? At the recommendation of Brian Adducci and Dan Baggenstoss, I bought my significant other the ever-so-sexy gadget Jambox by Jawbone. It looks gorgeous and sounds decent - once you are able to rip it out of the armageddon-proofed packaging. It didn't quite ruin Christmas, but the ten minutes it took to figure out how to wedge the damn thing out of the plastic box was a buzz kill.

The one other time I had a serious issue with plastic clamshell type packaging involved me, a tent in the northern Minnesota boundary waters wilderness area, a large unidentifed animal prowling the campsite and an indestructible bottle of bear spray that I could not, for the life of me (literally), remove from the plastic packaging. Please, don't ask me to relive the whole story. Let's just say I am still here, still functional and willing to carry a pair of scissors on my next canoe/camping trip.

At least the landfill will be silent, SunChips.

A coworker just drew my attention to the news that Frito-Lay is removing the much-touted compostable SunChips bag (in fact, I touted it on this very blog!) on five of the six flavors because... it's too noisy. Observe the evidence:

 

There's just one sad little group saying screw the noise, we'll put up with that for the sake of the planet.

This is an extremely difficult dilemma for Frito-Lay. On the one hand, they attempted something very innovative, and built significant awareness of the need for packaging to be sustainable. But this is also a good example of the challenge of implementing change in a behemoth organization, with an established brand. Perhaps if a new upstart brand had launched the compostable bag, it could have made the noise factor its hallmark and forced other competitors to adapt.

At the end of the day, in the for-profit world there cannot be environmental sustainability without economic sustainability.

It's a shame that the environment loses, for now, however hopefully this will push Frito-Lay to develop something more quiet and even more green in the near future.

The Dieline gets boozy

Things just keep getting better for The Dieline. They've noticed there's enough sweet wine packaging out there to give the genre its own blog, at The Dieline Wine.

Wow

So today I turn the ripe old age of 29. Last official year of being a twenty-something.

Thankfully, or should I say tankfully, Capsule's Becca organized to have Minneapolis' own Tank Goodness deliver some incredible deliciousness in the form of chocolate chip cookies. Warm and gooey, out of the oven exactly thirty minutes before they came to our door. Is there anything better?

These are the real deal, and being packaging design freaks we had to take some snaps before we ripped into the boxes. I could not recommend these more highly. If someone out there figures out the recipe, I'll pay good money for it. I love baking, I love local, and I love family businesses with a great story. Here is theirs.

Tanks guys!

 

Fuse Conference: Jamie Oliver: Naked Chef

Really looking forward to the Track 3 option with people from Jamie Oliver's company speaking with Pearlfisher. Certainly it will not be as inspiring as Jamie's speech at TED, but hopefully it will give us something to consider.

Jamie's TED Speech.

Enjoy as we do all that is TED.

We witnessed a stunning waste

Aaron walked into the office this morning holding a mysterious Blackberry-sized box.

"BRING THIS PHONE INTO ONE OF OUR STORES AND TRADE FOR A FREE BLACKBERRY CURVE" it screamed. He informed us that it appeared every house in his neighborhood had been slammed with the promotion. The box contained a retail display unit of a Blackberry 8830, courtesy of Verizon. A retail display unit is a mock phone - it looks exactly like the real deal, feels the same, weighs the same, and probably takes almost as much material and energy to construct as a working model. How many people actually still believe in the "this phone is free!!!" concept? I think most of us long ago cracked onto the fact that you simply pay for them over the duration of the contract, disguised in other fees.

So. What is Aaron now supposed to do with this thing? Seeing as it is mixed media and cannot be simply placed in his home recycling bin, is he supposed to try to locate an adequate recycling facility and bring it there? Do you think he appreciates for this imposition on his time?

This got his attention, sure. Long enough to bring it into Capsule, dump it on my desk, and suggest we rant about it. But, unlike a two year old child, we expect Verizon to be aware that there's a difference between positive attention, and the opposite. Inspiring feelings of admiration, trust and energy in your consumers is preferable to anger, inconvenience and eye-rolling, yes?

Who moved my gorgonzola, damn it?

(Or, navigating the navigation - a packaging essential)

Walk into a retail environment and look around. Start counting the brands you can identify and those you can't. If you start to feel like you're counting stars in the sky (minus the romance), you're getting it.

Navigating in the age of pirates and treasure chests involved the challenge of crossing vast oceans. Today, consumers face the overwhelming task of navigating vast megastores instead, stocked with brands and packages from all over the world.

Help the pirate reach your treasure trove by considering the importance of navigation when packaging your product and releasing it to the open market.

What happens when a consumer walks down the aisle? Exactly how is your package happily tossed into her cart? By using design tools, consumer are given navigation clues to reach the destination you set out for them. There are navigation elements that help move them through the category of options. And there are elements that get them to the exact SKU within your display of options.

Navigation involves visual clues like type, color, pattern, words, shapes and anything else visible. Some parts of a package serve to connect it to the larger family of products, while other elements make the package utterly distinctive. The full effect of these elements can only be understood by looking at the category as a whole, i.e. context matters.

And what about the aisle experience? Until you spend time observing and analyzing why consumers do what they do, it may appear that they're behaving quite erratically. Consumer behavior may seem irrational until ideas surface that address the behavior, and then the consumers are rational and valuable to the brand manager who achieves this greater understanding.

To learn more about the other essential factors of good packaging, check out our latest book, Design Matters // Packaging 01.

Capsule's Brian Adducci on the Dieline blog

Hop on over to the world's #1 packaging design blog to check out our creative principal's column on experience design and packaging.

Earth Day - sustainable packaging news

In honor of Earth Day, let's take a look at the Frito-Lay fully compostable Sunchips bag made from plant-based materials.

Frito-Lay introduced a significant rebranding earlier this year after researching women's attitudes and emotions around snacking. While it was found that women snack more than men, they are not choosing Frito-Lay products as their snacks. New packaging, flavors and an ad campaign have been introduced in an effort to sway women away from their celery sticks and/or brownies. (Frito-Lay research found that women snack 14 percent of the time on salty foods. They snack 25 percent of the time on sweet foods; the other 61 percent of snacking includes drinks, fruits and vegetables. Oprah would be proud.)

Sunchips has been one of the company's best-selling products, and it's also the focus for a pretty revolutionary packaging concept. I aplaud Frito-Lay for this innovation, set to launch next year. Good stuff. Hopefully they'll be the leaders of an entirely new movement.

Tropicana lost 20% in sales with redesign

Adage today wrote about the sales figures that equaled doom for the new packaging design. When the new packaging was released, unit sales dropped by 20 per cent in around 6 weeks.

The kicker for me was that 19 per cent of dollar sales for Tropicana - this is orange juice, people, not toilet paper - cost the company "tens of millions". Who's buying all of this orange juice?!

It's fairly unusual for a company to pull the plug on new package design so quickly, and so when the dump was announced (I blogged about it here) there was much speculation as to why. Obviously, it all boils down to numbers.

It makes me really curious about the Pepsi cola redesign (blogged here) and the effect that it must have had on sales. This redesign set the design world on fire with controversy. It got a very lukewarm response from the Capsule designers, to put it politely. And yet for it not to be pulled in the same way as Tropicana was, it must be selling relatively well. Or, there are some stubborn people in charge of the brand.

Does anyone know any more about this?