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.

Condos being built In North American cities today average about 600 square feet.  In some places, the average new-build unit is closer 500 square feet.  Few industry analysts expect this trend to reverse in the foreseeable future.

What’s going on (and how does it affect marketers)?

Young couples are crowding into cities. The young are mobile, and suburban housing tracts have become unattractive dead zones.  Competition for urban digs has raised the price of a square foot of condo.  But it’s more than price.  They simply don’t need the space.

Bookshelves? Magazine racks?  Replaced by an e-book reader.

CD/DVD storage?  Digital files live in a laptop, pad, smart phone, or “the cloud”.

Television?  That flat screen is just a moving picture on the wall. With network tv circling the drain of irrelevance and cable tv looking as tired as wired phone service ten years ago, the tv set as a dedicated appliance will probably disappear altogether.

Clothes?  With the demise of specialized office attire, closets can be smaller.

Foodstuffs? Cooking from scratch has been zapped by microwaves and take-home meals, so food storage and kitchen appliance needs shrink.

Downstairs from that 600 square foot condo you’ll find a garage with one parking space for every two or three or four units.  This dramatic reversal of the traditional one-space-per unit standard marks the confluence of zoning strategies to diminish urban traffic congestion; reduced utility of personal vehicles in cities where businesses don’t provide parking; and a perception among young people that a owning a car is ecologically immoral and fiscally irrational.   Public transport and internet-mediated car-share services will do just fine, thank you.

It’s obvious why residential downsizing matters.  With less room for “stuff”, it’ll be harder to sell stuff.

Clearly a boon to the planet, but maybe not so good for annual bonuses.

In packaged goods, we expect The Law Of Unintended Consequences to lead to a painful result (the new flavor replaces a long-time steady seller on many store shelves).

Much to the surprise of food marketers in Asia, a higher-margin, higher-frequency condiment segment sprang from a “green” campaign to reduce the footprint of products like sauces and salad dressings.

Manufacturers introduced concentrated gel forms of traditional sauces and dressings in squeeze tubes alongside traditional water-based forms in glass jars.

The smaller and lighter tubes deliver the same amount of active flavoring ingredients as the jars while saving on transportation costs, shelf space, and home storage.

Initial sales were good, especially to younger consumers.  The big surprise is that repeat sales rates are impressively better than those for the traditional products.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many young people squeeze the gel straight from the tube onto sandwiches, crackers, musubis, or whatever because they prefer the flavor intensity of the concentrated form.

Although young American consumers have taken to extra-intense chip and dip flavors, concentrated gel forms of sauces and dressings haven’t (as far as we know) appeared in the U.S.A.

Hmmmmmm…

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?

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?)

So the internet is disrupting conventional retailing structures.

Ho hum. So what else in new?

Infrequently, we stumble across something that demonstrates how our electronic nervous system can evolve a new business model that solves important problems for producer and consumer.  Better product, better distribution, and (we assume) a nice profit for those with the smarts and the guts to try something more complex than re-selling SuperBowl trivia.

The case in point is CleanFish Alliance – a company that sets standards for producing high-quality, eco-friendly “artisanal seafood” – helps members meet those standards; helps manage distribution; and directs restaurant buyers and quality-driven consumers to sustainable sources for these products.

It’s a new and important business model potentiated by the internet.

And no, we didn’t make the name.  Wish we had, though.  It couldn’t be better.

Have a look at their site at CleanFish Seafood:

As media advertising fades away, the value of a clearly defined brand grows.  In our not-so-humble opinion, McInhenny’s Tabasco Sauce is a paragon of clear, consistent, and forceful branding.

Launched in 1868 by Edmund McIlhennny, the product is a hot sauce made from tabasco peppers, a Mexican variety planted on an island in South Louisiana.  From the beginning, McIlhenny realized the value of brand identity. His first batch was sent to stores in cologne bottles from New Orleans warehouse.  The package remains unique and evocative:

This 19th century McIlhenny print ad is an icon of graphics arts education.  Imagine its effect as a point-of-purchase display alongside today’s bland supermarket labels:

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!