In a recent business discussion, we encountered the phrase: “the poverty of American packaged goods art” – so obviously true that nobody in the group commented, much less objected. New products folk don’t talk about it much, but the soft drink, beer, snack, bread, and prepared foods packages that define our craft (think Coke and Pepsi and Bud and Wheat Thins and Campbell’s) are as visually exciting as smog.

America may be the 900 pound gorilla of packaged goods, but compared to the visual imagination of such contemporary products as iPhone tiles, bicycles, and online games), it looks like the packaged goods gorilla lost interest 20 years ago.

A problem? Only if you assume some hot young marketing team in (for example) Baltic Europe will notice our lethargy and convince management to launch in your category here.  Might be a while.  Then again, might not.

Forgive the cliché, but we see it as an opportunity.  If you think about it, all cans of Pepsi or all boxes of Wheat Thins don’t have to be the same.  Without diminishing the brand (which, to a generation that explores the world as text on a screen is a word rather than the PMS color of the paperboard box), the package can be startling, stimulating…different!

Would young consumers buy a 12-pack of beer or a box of crackers because the package art changes?  Not if the change were merely color or typeface or (spew!) a New New New banner.  But brilliant illustration – art for art’s sake – maybe so.

These snippets of art that would grab the consumer by the frontal lobes are clipped from images on what has been called “the richest source of book-related illustration in the universe”.  It’s a website that contains thousands of illustrations – and every one of them is more interesting than anything your design team has ever proposed.

The site’s had several names over the years, but is now 50 Watts.

To a marketer, it is obvious that color choices in socially visible products mirror consumer mood.

Design teams and consumer researchers labor mightily to nail the hues chosen for apparel, furniture, socially-purposed alcoholic beverages like vodka and whiskey, and (the big kahuna of social symbolism) vehicles.

To do this, they look backward (what happened last year, long term trends); sideways (what’s going on now that could affect what we want to project in identity-defining purchases); and forward (via the social sciences, including politics and economics).

They hire independent color labs and the consulting arms of makers of dyes, paints and pigments.

At NameLab, we were debating the significance of the fact that the 77% of automobiles delivered in 2010 were painted in “colorless colors”, which we noticed in an article in the excellent Wheels blog of the New York Times (Global Car Colors):

1. 1. Silver – 25 percent
2. 2. Black – 23 percent
3. 3. White – 16 percent
4. 4. Gray – 13 percent
5. Blue – 9 percent
6. Red – 8 percent
7. Brown/Beige – 4 percent
8. Green – 1 percent
9. Yellow/Gold – 1 percent

10.  Others – less than 1 percent

Does this mean that you should reconsider that proposed orange-and-blue beverage label?

We don’t know. But you have to admit it’s an interesting question.

Is it just our reaction, or has the current wave of beer commercials devolved to the troglodyte level?

Whatever the brand, the spots are bar or party scenes in which the driving creative idea is: “You don’t drink Bud Light?  You’ll never have sex or move out of your mother’s garage.”

Research driven?  God help us all if that’s the only way to sell beer to American men!

We think it’s creative fatigue – a polite term for “the brand manager doesn’t know any better so why should we bother to think”.

In other countries, agency creative departments seem less fatigued.

We admit that it’s not a fair comparison because this Sapporo commercial is a two-minute CGI production for the internet.  Interweaving computer game themes, brewing, manly legends and contemporary lifestyle, it blows away young male beer buyers.

YouTube – Sapporo Beer C#191B7F

Science author James Gleick (Chaos, Genius, Faster) recently published The Information, a history and analysis of the systems humankind has created to comprehend our world.

It’s a brilliant book (someone will eventually find another adjective to describe Mr. Gleick’s works) that includes Two Wordbooks, a chapter devoted to historical linguistics.  This isn’t the intellectually radiant heart of the book (that would be the chapter on memes), but as linguists it floats our boat.

Beyond wondering why it never occurred to any of us that there was a pre-alphabetized world (with sequential alphabets but without the idea of using them to organize lists), the chapter seems to bear upon the management of identity in packaged goods marketing.

It tells the tale of Robert Cawdrey, a village priest who published a book in 1606 “for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillfull persons…whereby they may more easily understand many hard English wordes which they shall heare or reade in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere…”

While this wasn’t the first book of English words, it was the first alphabetized dictionary.  The concept of organizing any list by notational sequence (a, b, c…) surely occurred to someone before Cawdrey, but this is the first recorded instance that has survived (via a single copy of the book in an Oxford University library).

Are we proposing that Dannon alphabetize its yogurt flavors in supermarket chill cases?  Maybe we are.

Gleick’s book is about the importance of information to human behavior.

Wine marketing is afflicted by weak information structure.  It’s clear that the chaos of wine identity drives consumers to other, more comprehensible beverage categories.

It seems impossible to us that the same eyes and brains won’t prefer a better-organized brand to a disorderly one.

Do you market soups? Detergents? Painkillers? Tampons?

Is your shelf of subtypes more clearly organized than the other guy’s?

The hottest new packaged goods category in the second decade of this century is energy drinks. For any marketing pro who’s just returned from an extended research assignment in North Korea, energy drinks are 80 to 320ml containers of sweet caffeine-laced fluids, many featuring a fashionable adjunct ingredient like acai, ginseng and/or gingko biloba.

In Japan, where the category originated more then 20 years ago, many brands feature heroic doses of B vitamins as well as caffeine (we suspect the FDA stands in the way of that strategy here).  Combining high unit price and very high volume, energy drinks are a huge business in Japan where this year’s hot product, Yunker Fanti, sells out its daily deliveries at ¥1600 (about $18) per 50ml bottle.

There are more than 30 brands on U.S. supermarket, convenience store, and drug store shelves. The volume leader is the Austrian-made soft-drink style 320ml  Red Bull.

5-Hour Energy, a made-in-Michigan Japanese-style 80ml brand (with an FDA-tolerable dose of B vitamins) is growing awareness and market-share.

Many of the brands in the field are cleverly named.  What’s strangely anemic are the package graphics. Selling the exciting promise of a jolt to relatively young consumers, package designers have been kept on a surprisingly short leash.

If we were product managers in the category, our package would look more like this illustration from an old German-language edition of Walter De La Mare’s ghost stories:

This wordless café sign in a stairwell on a Fukuoka alley may reveal an earthquake fault under Starbucks’ business model.

In Japan, as in America, Starbucks stores are so pervasive and consistent that they define the coffee urban experience.  That sounds great…at first glance.

A small café like this one is often a one-man operation run by a young owner who knows the young adult audience by being part of it.  Gaze at the sign for a moment and think about what the guy pulling espressos upstairs was thinking when he designed it.   Such a place doesn’t advertise.  The sign is its only way of attracting customers. What’s message did he choose to bring them in?

We think the sign says “not Starbucks” in no uncertain terms…and we suspect that this message attracts young consumers who think Starbucks coffee tastes fine but find the Starbucks experience boring because it is and (in their adult years) has always been the same.

In the café biz, Starbucks is a high-overhead retailer. They need a premium price to pay the rent.  Us packaged goods guys know that coffee is coffee – the price premium derives from the experience.

Our vote for the worst packaged goods branding is the wine category:http://www.namelab.com/blog/2009/02/the-worst-packaged-goods-branding-wine/, but premium coffee beans aren’t far behind.  Like the wine shopper, the premium coffee shopper is offered little useful information about how one brew differs from the next (half are “bright and lively”, half are “robust and full-bodied”).

Brand and type names are so obscure and packages are so unmemorable that it’s not that easy to grab another bag of the “pretty good one” you bought 2 weeks ago.

In our supermarket’s premium coffee section, you can pay anywhere from $8.00 to $25.00 for a pound of beans…but there are few cues as to why this bag is worth three times the cost of that bag.

In NameLab’s not-so-humble opinion, such marketing ineptitude drives a fair number of shoppers to the orderly, understandable, and lower-priced mainstream ground coffee shelves.

To exploit this mess, Starbucks has launched simple, meaningful, understandable Seattle’s Best packaging – numbers from one-to-five identifying “coffee levels” (punch, flavor plus other so far undefined qualities) – on the premium beans shelf. The new design’s large numerals and crisp, non-traditional colors leap out of the brown-dominated bean shelf array.

It looks like their idea is to persuade the shopper to “try the next level” – promoting exploration within the brand rather than from brand-to-brand.  Such exploration is also encouraged by the fact that they’ve made it so easy to find the one you bought last time if the new level doesn’t suit your palate as well as that one did.

Bravo Starbucks!  (You ever consider getting into the wine business?)

If you’ve been wondering how the widely-distributed Newman’s Own food brand would fare after the death of Paul Newman in 2008, here’s an update – it’s doing fine.

Founded in 1982 by Newman and a partner, the company eventually produced products ranging from salad dressing to lemonade.  Still privately held, its sales are estimated to be running at better than $100 million a year, with no drop off since Mr. Newman’s demise.

Since Mr. Newman was a screen actor – a celebrity rather than a food icon like Colonel Sanders or Wolfgang Puck – many marketing professionals expected his brand to wane once he was permanently off the public radar.

But a combination of early dedication to healthful ingredients and Mr. Newman’s promise to “donate every cent of my share of after-tax profits to charity” has created an enviable level of consumer loyalty to the brand.

It’s a clear example of the  fact that in this century brand behavior influences consumers more than claims.  Newman’s behaviors  (healthful ingredients, charitable giving)  add a positive patina to the consumers’ ideas about what a “brand” is.

Bravo!