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Thinking About
‘The Box’
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Business New Haven
3/23/1998
By: Deborah Ketai
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Marketing people love to talk about “thinking outside the box.” Too bad, in a way, because a lot of creative energy goes into the box itself - the packaging.
Packaging has to attract attention on a crowded shelf, tell what the product is, and give the consumer a reason to buy it - not to mention explaining how to use the product, complying with regulatory requirements, and so on. It's a tall order for graphic designers.
“Even in janitorial supplies, where you'd think no one pays attention to the packaging, people tend to order the ones that catch their eyes,” says Barry Etra of Connecticut Container, which designs and manufactures retail packaging and displays.
Etra, the North Haven company's vice president of sales and marketing, offers perhaps the ultimate example: A toilet seat once packaged in a plain 30-cent brown carton now comes in a white box with a litho label. The new packaging costs roughly five times as much as the old, Etra says, but will more than pay for itself if it motivates another ten to 12 percent of prospects to buy.
Catching consumers' eyes takes more and more ingenuity. Milford designer Kevin Hall used to harness his creativity in service to General Foods. Now he helps smaller companies, such as Stamford's Felicia Foods, compete against national brands with much bigger budgets. Before he starts designing, Hall visits chain supermarkets to see how nationally distributed brands look.
In fact, much of today's packaging planning, research and evaluation takes place in-store. A big fan of point-of-purchase (POP) research, Kentuckian Bob Stevens warns against making final packaging decisions at designers' workstations. “They designed it with light coming from 360 degrees all around it,” he says. “In the store, it only comes from one direction.” Worse, colors that look great on an isolated package may look completely different amid other products.
Stevens spent most of his career with Procter & Gamble. Now semi-retired (“except to the 'Infernal' Revenue Service”), he travels the country speaking to consumer product companies like Bridgeport-based Remington.
Remington's director of marketing, Sheryl Wengel, also advocates POP testing: “Put [the package] in the realm of the competitive set so you can truly see it as the consumer would see it and make sure you're getting the reaction you want.”
Wengel adds that today's retailers, in trying to make the shopping experience easier for consumers, are changing the way they display entire categories - forcing marketers to differentiate their lines more clearly. Packaging must answer consumers' functional and aesthetic needs (i.e., this product will do what I want and this looks like a product I'd like to have).
Remington is redesigning the packaging for its personal care lines, aiming at “a family of looks” in which all products will be easily identifiable as Remington-made. A “callout box” on each package will point out the specific benefits and features of the product inside. Opaque packaging will sport product illustrations to show consumers what they are buying.
Wengel and Hall both acknowledge that today's consumer has to see the product, whether through transparent packaging or in a picture. Another recent packaging trend, says Hall, is the move toward “maximum color contrast” between copy and background to enhance readability.
To Etra, all the trends boil down to one: “away from nondescript packaging, towards value-added packaging.”
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