U by Kotex - Tween packaging design

Much work has been going on recently to explore this area and the following article provides some useful and interesting insights into how best to differentiate your packaging to appeal to this particular audience, who:

1. Aspire to be older, but are still children.
2. Want to be unique, but also still fit in.
3. Have strong ideas about what they want to buy, but need parental involvement and approval to purchase those things.

But, whilst also being mindful of the underlying needs of their parents who still have  a big ‘hand’ in what they buy. Some great examples are demonstrated by U by Kotex Tween and Geo Girl, Walmart’s new line of Eco-friendly cosmetics for 8 to 12 year olds (which personally I feel a little less comfortable with)…..but read on and let us know what you think…..

You can read the rest of the article here (via Healthcare Packaging): Tween-tastic package design

Chris Penfold

It has announced plans to use Augmented Reality (AR) technology to engage consumers by enabling them to play a digital game when their chocolate packaging is viewed via a smartphone camera.

The ‘Quaksmack’ game, devised by Blippar, who are a UK-based technology firm, recognises Cadbury’s packaging in a similar manner to a QR code and transforms the packaging itself into an interactive game. The app is available in Android and Apple versions.

Check out this video to preview the game:

Players choose to be a ‘Spot’ or ‘Stripe’, before ducks appear from either side of the chocolate bar. They have to ‘smack’ the opposing team’s ducks by tapping the screen.

The game, is part of the Cadbury brands ongoing Spot V Stripes London Olympics initiative  and will be available across all Cadbury chocolate bars, except for Creme Eggs and Wispas.

Commenting to Packaging News, Kraft Foods digital head Sonia Carter said: “We loved Blippar from the moment we saw it in action. We were blown away by the technology and we’re certain consumers will be. With one in three UK adults owning a smartphone the potential market for initiatives like this is huge and we are proud to be bringing this incredible technology to the masses….It doesn’t seem all that long ago we were all marvelling at what QR codes could do but Blippar’s ‘markless image recognition’ technology takes the experience to a whole new level.”

Blippar chief executive and co-founder Ambarish Mitra, reinforced a deep-help belief of mine that: “Image-recognition enabled Augmented Reality is far from a ‘gimmick’ and will fundamentally change how consumers interact with their favourite real-world brands.”

Thanks to Packaging News for bringing our attention to this article. You can read further related packaging AR and technology articles here: Related technology articles

Chris Penfold

Effective Packaging Training

We’ve just scheduled-in our latest packaging training courses and interactive workshops for May, including ‘Branded added-value packaging’, ‘Introduction to pharmaceutical packaging’ & ‘Injection Moulding/tooling’ -  Take a look and let us know what you think. We are always looking for new topics of interest and we can run bespoke (tailored) courses at your premises for your whole team, whether in the UK or internationally -  generally much more focused & cost effective for you.

We’ve also got another 8 or 9 courses & workshops planned in for June and July. As well as our highly acclaimed ‘Plastics Materials’ course, we have many new topics, including ‘bar coding (including mass serialisation)’, ’sustainability’, ‘Medical Devices’, ‘Print processes & decoration’, ‘Glass’, ‘Blister materials’, ‘Regulatory aspects’ and ‘Innovation, creativity & breakthrough thinking’.

So watch this space – We’ll keep you updated!

Follow this link to view our latest training courses

Have a great Easter!

Chris Penfold

New Sensodyne carton packaging using Fresnel lens technology

Local Nottingham printer, Chesapeake Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Packaging has helped develop packaging for GSK’s global launch of its new Sensodyne Repair & Protect oral care product. The novel cartons feature 3-D features intended to simulate a life-like model of a tooth as well as close-up images that help to describe the benefits of using the product. The effect is achieved by the incorporation of a series of ‘Fresnel lenses’ into the carton-board, which demands absolute production precision. The lens area is then overprinted, which requires exacting print registration. The resulting life-like perspective produces the impression of depth which provides the pack with a tactile quality that is further enhanced by the carton’s bevelled edge.

An interesting product feature that certainly has a novelty appeal but I’m not sure how effective the 3D-effect will be in educating and informing consumers. An improvement to this could be via use of 2D data matrix barcode to take consumers to a GSK website that then provides more in-depth information and videos. What do you think?

Source: PMPNews.com
Read more about leading-edge technologies that could add value for consumers by following this link to our Technology Folder

Chris Penfold

Professor Streckl & Duk Young Kim's research takes us ever-nearer to moving pictures on packaging

A breakthrough in a University of Cincinnati engineering lab that could clear the way for a low-cost, even disposable, e-reader is gaining considerable attention and this technology could have ‘far-reaching’ implications and provide all sorts of opportunities in the field of packaging, with the ability to ‘print’ moving pictures (of a quality seen on glass) onto flexible packaging.

Electrical Engineering Professor Andrew Steckl, together with UC doctoral student Duk Young Kim, have researched into an affordable, yet high-performance, paper-based display technology which has demonstrated that paper could be used as a flexible host material for an ‘electrowetting’ device. Electrowetting (EW) involves applying an electric field to coloured droplets within a display in order to reveal content such as type, photographs and video.

Steckl’s discovery that paper could be used as the host material has far-reaching implications considering other popular e-readers on the market such as the Kindle and iPad rely on complex circuitry printed over a rigid glass substrate. Steckl says: “It is pretty exciting. With the right paper, the right process and the right device fabrication technique, you can get results that are as good as you would get on glass, and our results are good enough for a video-style e-reader.”

He imagines a future device that is “rollable, feels like paper yet delivers books, news and even high-resolution color video in bright-light conditions” – perfect for packaging applications (in my opinion)! If you combine this with the Sony technology (Rollable OTFT screen) that we wrote about recently, the packaging possibilities are endless!

Read more about this type of technology in our ‘Technology’ folder.

You can read the full Steckl article at www.nanowerk.com

Chris Penfold

coca cola - branded packaging that delivers

In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, effective branding is essential.

So we are running a 1 day course to give you hints, tips and pointers on how to make your product stand out on shelf through effective packaging as a marketing tool.

It will explain how to transform your good brand into a GREAT brand and help take your products to the ‘next level’, looking at a number of important aspects including brand values, added value & convenience, rationalisation, pack size, reducing material cost and innovation to get retailer acceptance, drive sales and increase profitability.

9th December 2010 at Biocity in Nottingham, UK

HURRY NOW – find out more & how to register to get an EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT by clicking Branded Packaging That Delivers

In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, effective branding is essential. Our branding/shelf impact course will give hints, tips and pointers on how to make your product stand out on shelf through effective packaging. It will explain how to transform your good brand into a GREAT brand and help take your products to the ‘next level’.

For more information on this or other training courses we are running please visit Design Cognition Training

Plastiki - David de Rothschild's yacht made of recycled PET bottles

As we have discussed in previous posts, there is a huge and ever-increasing mountain of rubbish growing in the middle of the Pacific, like a giant festering ’soup’, much of which consists of plastic packaging waste. This has had a massive knock-on affect in the  form of polluted beaches on islands throughout the South Pacific. See our previous article: Great Pacific Garbage Patch article

David de Rothschild is a man on a mission. The offspring of the wealthy banking family, he is one of a new breed of environmental crusaders and entrepreneurs that some are calling ‘Gaia capitalists’. ‘Gaia’ in mythology was the primal Greek goddess of the Earth and aptly a ‘gyre’ in oceanography is any large system of rotating ocean currents (source: Wikipedia).

To highlight the Pacific issue and raise it’s profile in mainstream media, De Rothschild decided to use his family’s high profile  (& money) to build a yacht made entirely of recycled plastic bottle packaging, which he named ‘Plastiki’ (making reference and tribute to the late Thor Heyerdahl’s papyrus Kon-tiki raft which crossed the Pacific back in 1947). Over a four month period he sailed this 60ft catamaran from San Francisco to Sydney, where he landed last week. But his exploits are no shallow ploy to fill aimless days with fun and adventure.

De Rothschild and his ‘Gaia’ friends are driven by a combination of social conscience and economic pragmatism, seeking a ‘paradigm shift’ in the way we live and desecrate our planet. They espouse a new form of capitalism that factors in the environment and social wellbeing as a cost. It considers protecting the environment not only as a moral issue but as a set of design challenges to correct inefficiencies that make the capitalist system unsustainable. Waste, for example, is considered the result of inadequate thinking. If you are smarter about it, and create products that work properly, then you shouldn’t have to throw anything away at the end – should you? The group include Chad Hurley (33) who with his co-founder, sold YouTube to Google for $1.6Bn and has since ploughed some of his fortune into the Green Products Innovation Institute and Jeffrey Skoll, worth $2.4Bn, who wrote the business plan for eBay and has set up the Skoll Foundation to encourage ’social entrepreneurs’ to play a greater role in developing a better world (source: The  Sunday Times).

These are ‘game changers’, who see solutions where others see problems – a new entrepreneurial revolution – one of collaboration something that de Rothschild calls ‘Planet 2.0′. So I feel that we will be hearing a lot more from this ‘band of brothers’ in the future. They mean to ‘rattle some cages’, get us all to think differently and make a real impact by influencing things at ‘the top’. They have a point! Can we really carry on the way we are? For a really ’sustainable future’, for our children and their children’s sakes, things have to change a lot quicker.What do you think?

Chris Penfold

There's no such thing as a free launch

The trouble with television programmes like High Street Dreams and Dragons Den, is that they only provide a
‘snapshot/soundbite’ of branding and the product development process, making it all appear oh-so-easy to the average ‘personon the street’. In reality, it’s a complicated process and there are a number of steps involved that should be considered before even thinking about approaching a branding or design agency and spending ‘hard-earned’ cash.
At Design Cognition we routinely get approached by all manner of entrepreneurs and small business owners who have very limited experience of branding and New Product Development (NPD). So we thought that we ought to provide some ‘pointers’ for those of you new to this arena, to get you to ‘stop and think’ and focus on what it is you are actually trying to achieve! It’s not in your interests or ours to develop products that have a high probability of failure.

So here are some fundamental questions to ask yourself, before you even think about branding & packaging:

What is your ‘Unique Selling Proposition’? – It is important to establish your USP at the outset so that you know what makes you different and how you can position yourself versus competitors.

What about your ‘Emotional Selling Proposition? – People don’t usually buy on logic, they buy based on many complex emotional feelings and triggers. This could be based on their aspirations or to help alleviate a problem. Tapping in to these emotional benefits will help bring your brand ‘alive’, build long-term customer relationships and help create differentiated ‘competitive advantage’ for your brand.

Who are your target market? Can they be segmented? – Generally, the narrower you can ‘cut’ the segment in which you are intending to operate, the more specifically you will be able to target key benefits & marketing effort in a particular niche. Be realistic about the size of the potential market. Reaching a global market on day one (or even in the first year) is usually a ‘pipedream’ and can take many years to achieve (if at all). It is best to concentrate initially on one smaller market (that you are familiar with) and use that as a valuable learning exercise.

Market Research – Why will someone buy your product, as opposed to someone else’s? Get an impartial view on this
(not friends & family – because they will tell you what you want to hear). You are too close to your cherished product and need to avoid myopia and ‘rose-tinted’ spectacle syndrome! A new methodology is gaining popularity in the US called ‘Customer Development’, which focuses on intelligently assessing the opportunity for an idea before developing it. In its simplest form, customer development could be summarised as:

• Customer discovery: What need is your initiative going to fulfill for the user? Is that really important to them (or is it just wishful thinking)? Do you offer a credible solution or are other alternatives more compelling?
• Customer validation: Are users willing to take the desired step, whether it is to try a sample of your product, buy it or try your affiliated services?
• Customer creation: How are you going to reach out to new users, build your audience base and build confidence? What are the costs and (measurable) outputs for each of your activities?
• Company building: Do you have the resources and processes to achieve the desired goal? Do you have the right skills yourself to brand, develop, market, sell and produce your product? If you haven’t got the skills yourself, it’s critical that you ‘buy-in’ the relevant expertise to help. It may seem an expensive approach but will avoid expensive & time-consuming mistakes, get you to market quicker and will pay ‘dividends’ in the long-run. However, with all of this information you should assess whether there is likely to be a reasonable return on your organization’s investment of time and resources (your own +/or bought-in resource)? No-one said that building and developing a brand would be easy – did they?

A useful tactic in customer validation is to market a product even if you haven’t built it yet. This “pre-marketing” of a product can help you assess the potential viability of the idea before spending a fortune. If it’s going to be a ‘flop’, it will inevitably be disappointing, but best to know early and ‘kill it’ before spending too much money – and turn your attention to more ‘valuecreating’ ideas.

Even if you think that the idea is strong, your target audience might not agree. There are a number of online tools that can help you test ideas, including:
www.performable.com: set up quick web-based landing pages, highlighting product benefits & see how they perform
www.usertesting.com and www.silverbackapp.com: put your project in front of users and get high-quality feedback
www.surveymonkey.com and 4Q: survey your users. But remember that people aren’t always objective in their responses

Or set up a temporary ‘outlet’ in an area in which your target market will congregate, such as a shopping centre, gym, sports club etc to talk to ‘real consumers’ face-to-face.

Many companies start by selling their products on-line, which can also provide useful feedback and can be ‘dovetailed’ with social media campaigns to build brand awareness and feedback. Google Adwords and Facebook Ads are also very useful for marketing tests, and can give you useful information about the possible cost of an advertising campaign.

Who are your potential competitors? – Important that you know who they are and what they are doing. Don’t just assume that you won’t have any. Who is operating in an affiliated area, with an established supply chain, that could migrate easily? This also gives a steer on your branding and packaging as you may need your product to ‘fit’ a certain category and yet still have stand-out.

How easy will it be for your competitors to copy you? – If your competitors are large and they take a liking to your product it might only be a matter of weeks before they launch a similar product. Have you engaged the advice of an IP attorney and:

a, undertaken an ‘IP’ search +/or

b, thought about ‘protecting’ your own idea?

If it’s as new, innovative and differentiated as you think it is – isn’t it worth protecting? It is critical that you do this earlier, rather than later. It should be your first task – before leaking your ideas into the ‘public-domain’.

Have you decided a target selling price? – What price will the market bear? At what price are your competitors presently selling? How will that affect where you pitch your price?

Have you considered who will produce & fill your products and where? – Are they being produced overseas? How will you manage supply? What leadtimes? How will you control the quality?

Have you calculated product costings? – What is the estimated cost price? How accurate is that? Does that include packing/filling/assembly? What about shipping? Does it include primary, secondary, transit & Point Of Sale (POS) packaging? If you will be selling through a distributor, have you allowed for their margin? What about retailer margin?

Have you considered any legal regulations relating to your product? – You will need to know what regulations will apply to your product in the specific country in which you want to sell. Any illegal claims or weights and measures could entail a hefty Trading Standards fine and/or a product recall, with all of the associated costs and litigation involved.

How are you going to distribute the product? – If you are hoping to sell into one of the large multinationals you may well find that they routinely take from 3-4 months to pay for goods received. How will you fund the first production run of your product? If you are intending to ‘pitch’ to their buyers, what stimulus material will you need? What benefits will you sell to them?

How are you going to fund the development of the product? – Getting a good looking and legally compliant product to market does take money. There may be grants available but you need to take a realistic look at all of the costs involved and consider how you will pay for them. At the end of the day the old adage ‘you only get what you pay for’ is true and developing a product or brand on a ‘shoestring’ in a ‘half-cocked’ manner will only end in disappointment and failure for all concerned.

Chris Penfold

Bex's beautiful pestle & mortar

It’s Friday and we’ve reached the end of a journey – the last in our series of reviews of the High Street Dreams, BBC ‘reality TV show’ about product branding, packaging & design development. Following on from yesterday, we continue to look at ‘Homeware’, but this time it’s the turn of Bex Simon, an artistic blacksmith who designs beautiful one-off metal-ware objects for the home.

From her forge in East London, she produces stunning one-off commissioned ‘works of art’ in steel. Everything from table-top candelabras to ornate garden gates. Like many other small businesses, she is limited by the achievable output from her ‘one-woman-band’ operation and to meet demand in a more ‘cut-throat’ commercial world would need to find reliable partners/outsourced resource who could produce her designs to the same quality but at a fraction of the cost.

Bex’s mentor in the show was product designer Nick Munro, who is famous for (at the age of 23) kick-staring his ‘business empire’ by turning a bedspring into a commercial success as an ‘egg cup’. He has since created ranges for John Lewis, Arga and Fired Earth, with over 500 designs in production. As a starting point he took Bex to the Victoria & Albert museum (V&A) to study 5 centuries-worth of ironmongery as inspiration. Was she inspired? You bet! Everything from cotton-twist glass, pan hangers, bells, door chimes and (the crowning glory) a pestle & mortar, which got Bex really excited!

So off she went to design her own and a week later, after mapping out all of her ideas on a giant floor-mural, came ‘back to the table’ with a wonderful pestle & mortar of her own. She contacted a commercial casting foundry regarding a mould and after commissioning a prototype, she sat down with the Jo Malone, Nick Leslau and Nick Munro to be quizzed about costings and, like many of the other creative ‘contestants’, failed miserably when it came to business and finance. Bex’s solution was to involve her husband Dave more in the business to cover the financial aspects, leaving her to cover the artistic elements.

Bex's alluring carton branding with pink logo & embossed bubbles

At this point branding consultancy Landor were brought into ‘the frame’, providers of branding to well known brands like Heinz Baked Beans, Morrison’s supermarkets and Vodafone, to name but a few. The result was some very alluring branding in the form of an eye-catching and distinctive bright pink anvil logo (great) and a very appropriate grey/slate carton embossed with some swirling bubbles, the logo and a short sentence on the back of the carton, also in bright pink lettering (tastefully done): “FORGED with LOVE”. Bex says of the logo, it was a “cleverly designed pink colour infill to be off centre to represent the jarring from the strike of the hammer” The box was lined with some matching bright pink tissue paper which added vibrancy & energy to the pestle and mortar product within. See the picture above. Of all of the High Street Dreams packaging shown over the past few weeks, this is my favourite. Bex says herself, on her website: ”the colours we chose for the packaging and website were to represent the filth and grime of the workshop, whilst maintaining a luxurious and premium feel.” Having looked at Bex’s website (link at end of this post), I think that the branding there is also well put together and professional looking – overall it’s all very well coordinated.

Along with Harry Singer (see yesterday’s Phlib post), the ‘big test’ for Bex was a 1-day test that Jo Malone sorted out at the national lifestyle exhibition – The Ideal Home Show at Earl’s Court in London. The three things that they were trying to evaluate were:
1.    How you sell your product
2.    Whether you are great PR ambassadors to your product
3.    How the consumers view your product

Unfortunately for Bex, unlike Harry, consumers weren’t as engaged for her, with products priced at £125 for a pewter? (or maybe steel) pestle and mortar and £250 for a bronze version. Everyone liked her work but no one was willing to pay that sort of money for a piece of ‘kitchen decorative art/furniture’, even though it was all “hand finished and polished”. This led to a concern by Jo and Nick that Bex wasn’t ready to pitch to a retailer – they thought that she needed more time to get her ‘act together’, which Bex took pretty well really. So she lived to ‘fight another day’. It’s interesting to note that, since the programme Bex announced on Twitter recently that she had been approached by Heals with a view to displaying some of her work in-store. So that’s a positive conclusion – well done Bex!

In terms of packaging, where does that leave us?

As far as I can tell, at the moment the only products that Bex is selling as ‘retail items’ are the pestle & mortar, which are available on her website for a price of £80 now  – a big reduction on what they were being sold for at the Ideal Home Show exhibition. Other products, such as her wrought iron gates and garden furniture etc are generally huge and bulky, one-off items. These are impractical to develop or even have a need for a range of bespoke packaging but I think that Bex should make the most of her branding and maybe make some wrought-iron ‘tags’ on which she could etch “FORGED with Love from Bex” with her logo (each painted pink) as a really engaging and personal note to each customer – and that would be really novel!
Informing
I believe that there is also a place for Bex to print some really high quality brochures (if she hasn’t done so already), with some stunning atmospheric photography to engage consumers at an emotional level, providing an opportunity for Bex to ‘connect’ with her target market. She could provide all sorts of information on the brand heritage, her vision for the business, brand values, the methods she uses to make her artistic creations, the quality of materials & methods used and really build an emotional story on which to ‘pivot’ her brand.
Transporting & Protecting

Clearly there is a need to transport and protect the large items as they are transported, which is probably best performed by some form of ‘designer (pink?) bubble-wrap’ or other, more environmentally friendly material. Careful use of traditional ‘padding’ materials like corrugated board and bubble-wrap can provide a simple enough ‘filler’ to protect the product from crushing, but there are a number of alternative organic, compostable and ‘sealed air’ filler materials around now that can also provide a more ‘environmentally friendly’ transit packaging solution. These could be complimented with the embossed ‘anvil’ metal labels that I mentioned above to provide some branding.
I hope that this has highlighted SOME of the added branding and packaging considerations that need to be taken into account when developing and selling high quality bespoke art products to the market. Well done Bex, we wish you every success in the future.
You can find out more about Bex’s products from her Bexsimon website.
Chris Penfold