THE AUTHORS
category? Would a New Yorker personality work for
us? How would a Lean Cuisine aesthetic work for our
brand? Well-defi ned brands are the visual symbols of
their own distinct positioning and the visual tools that
evoke them. They can easily be used as analogies to
inspire completely nonrelated categories.
The smartest thing I ever heard anyone say about
package design is…
It needs to be quantifi ed.” We need an empirical
measure to determine how many dollars of
incremental profi t come back to the brand owner
for every dollar invested in design. I’d imagine that
many of the brands in this book are not supported by
advertising, and package design is their only form of
consumer connection. Even among heavily advertised
brands, package design is the most permanent
part of their brand message, and the one seen by
the most consumers. Really good packaging design
continues to drive brand affi nity throughout multiple
advertising campaigns, countless promotions,
numerous changes in brand management, and all
the other elements of a brand’s evolution.
AUTHOR’S
CHOICE
AWARD
21
The best career advice I ever received was…
from my dad, co-founder of Wallace Church (and
my mentor), who said, “Follow your passion.” This
industry ain’t for wimps. You have to fall in love with
it in order to succeed. And the industry is blessed to
be populated with passionate and talented people, as
evidenced in this book.
Most designers probably don’t know that…
Brand identity/package design generates the
highest return on investment of any marketing
communications effort, bar none. Most designers
might feel that this is true but not know how to prove
it. Most marketers probably don’t know this. Our goal
as an industry is to prove to ourselves, our clients,
and the general business community that (to quote
Thomas J. Watson) “good design is good business.”
Only then will design and the design process have
best practices. Only then will design consistently
receive the proper time and resources required to do
it right. Only then will design consultancies be able
to justify proper compensation for their contribution
to brand success. Only then will design be respected
for what it is—the single most effective and cost-
effi cient branding tool!
“
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really good packagINg explaINed
10 Mistakes Designers Make
When Creating Packaging Design
by rob wallace
1. Stop listening.
Designers are so viscerally intuitive that they often
get an immediate vision in their heads about the
perfect solution before the client has fully explained
the project. Great designers suspend their creative
minds for a bit and use their analytical skills during
briefs and design critiques. They listen while clients
describe their issues, and they put them into a
hierarchy. They ask questions, lots of them. They
present alternative directions. With a good designer
leading the discussion, clients often solve their own
problems. And then, the designer can be much more
efficient in giving them exactly what they want.
2. Giving them what they want.
OK, so after you lead the client to articulate exactly
what they want, you just do that, right? Wrong.
Great designers go beyond the expected and create
effective solutions that also elevate consumers’
design sensibilities. The objective of every brand-
identity assignment is to sell the product and
build a long-lasting emotional connection with
the consumer. However, every assignment should
also seek to raise design literacy, literally teaching
consumers to respond to better design.
3. Misunderstanding design research.
Regardless of how much you and the client both
like your concepts, package design’s first true
test of success is qualitative and quantitative
consumer research. If the designer is not involved
in determining the methodology and the questions
being asked, the results can be not only confusing
but also misleading. Research teams all too often
want one primary valuation: purchase intent. Would
you buy this? They don’t care as much about the
reasons why. Research respondents, on the other
hand, are biased by their relationship to the existing
brand—or competitive brands—and what they
remember from the store. Optimizing package-
design research is a much larger issue—perhaps
worthy of its own book—but designers must also
look for and correct the trapping questions. They
must attend and help interpret research findings,
and they must fight for the actionable insights that
will improve their work.
4. Designing for themselves.
It’s pretty rare that a brand’s target audience is an
exclusive group of highly evolved, elite visualists.
Designers are not your brand’s target market, so
what appeals to you may be quite irrelevant to your
audience. Think like them. Get into their heads
and determine the visual cues that motivate their
behavior. When we look at designers’ portfolios, we
want to see a high level of diversity, proving that they
can design well beyond their own personal aesthetic.
5. Not managing expectations/Selling through/
Managing up.
Needless to say, design is exceptionally subjective.
What you and your design manager love, their
marketing team and executive management might
pee all over. Designers need to be storytellers.
You need to have an articulate rationale for every
decision you make, and you need to be able to
tie that story back to the brand. If you can justify
your opinions, you’ll have a much higher degree of
success in selling a concept through an organization.
6. Limiting your influences.
Great designers get inspiration from everywhere, not
only through the ’net and the competition entries but
in the way that the wrapper of your buttered bagel
is folded. Get your head out of the annuals and get
into a supermarket, a drugstore, a big-box retailer
and open your eyes. Inspiration is everywhere, and
everything—literally, everything!—can be redesigned
to be better. Reinvent the ordinary. Reject the jaded.
Celebrate the unexpected.
7. Falling in love with your work/Knowing when to
stop.
Don’t get me wrong. Passion fuels great design. So
fall in love with the process, but understand that
design is a business. You need to be compensated
for the value of what you do. Ambitious designers are
often too close to their work. They present several
variations of ten to twelve concepts and thereby
completely confuse their clients. Each design should
achieve each individual objective in a different and
relevant way. This leads to fewer but more focused
and powerful concepts. When in doubt, leave it out.
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THE AUTHORS
If the client asks if you tried X, Y, and Z, you can then
pull out those additional roughs and explain what
worked, what did not, and why you abandoned them
to concentrate on the most effective solutions.
8. Not telling a story.
An effective design presentation is a performance:
It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You are
not only there to simply verbalize what your clients
can already see; you are there to delight and inspire
them. Tell them about your influences and what
worked and why. Tell them the different emotions
that will be evoked by each element of your work.
Present several truly discrete and articulate
solutions, but also have a strong and credible point
of view. Lead them to your recommended design
strategies and engage their passions.
9. Not collaborating between disciplines.
Package design is the cornerstone of an integrated
brand communication architecture. While consumers
might learn of the brand on the ‘net or television or
other commercial media, it is their engagement at
the point of sale that’s the most relevant. They decide
to buy the product because of the package. They
take it home. They interact with it whenever they
are using the product. The consumer engages the
brand. And yet, package designers and advertising
creatives and Web developers and social-network
craftspeople rarely meet to share ideas and
synthesize their efforts. Get out of your discipline and
learn how brand communication design works. Invite
these counterparts into the package-design process.
Collectively discover the visual strategies that will
synthesize every consumer touchpoint.
10. Overreliance on your tools
Computer-aided design is a blessing and a curse.
Yes, we are able to immediately gradate backgrounds
and dimensionalize type, but we are losing design
craftsmanship in the process. As a result, there are
fewer and fewer designers who still have incredible
hand skills.
Dust off your airbrush. Hand-letter your next logo.
Experiment more with cut paper and vellum. With
credit to the amazing advancements in design
technology, if you can’t communicate your solution
with a felt-tip pen on the back of an envelope, you’re
relying too much on your computer.
As managing partner of New York City–based brand identity,
strategy, and package design consultancy Wallace Church
Inc., Rob Wallace works with some of the world’s smartest
and most successful consumer brand marketers, including
Coca-Cola, Nestle, Kraft, Heinz, Miller Brewing, Dell,
Colgate-Palmolive, and Brown-Forman.
Rob began his career at Grey Advertising and worked for
several marketing consultancies before joining Stan Church
in 1985, bringing his strategic insights to the firm’s award-
winning creative process.
Rob is on the board of advisors of the Design Management
Institute, and a member of the distinguished faculty of
the In-Store Marketing Institute. He speaks at dozens of
marketing industry events and lectures at Columbia Business
School, Georgetown University, and other post-graduate
programs.
Brand identity is Rob’s passion. The guru of design’s return
on investment, Rob focuses on proving that brand identity/
package design is a marketer’s single most eective tool.
When not traveling or entertaining with his wife and three
daughters, Rob plays a wicked blues harmonica and a truly
terrible game of golf.
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THE AUTHORS
Really good package design is elusive
A package that just does
its job of holding the
product and providing a
surface for listing product
attributes is not taking
full advantage of the
opportunity to tell the
brand story.
What makes a package “really good”? I must have asked myself
that nearly 200 times while reviewing the work for this book. Since
the goal of this book is to get at the guts of that very question, I
wanted to find a consistent answer. If package design were an
exact science, dictated by formulas of color and type layout, this
book would contain thousands of examples. But the fact is that
really good package design is elusive.
The critiquing process was excruciating, exciting, and enlightening.
With some examples, it was immediately clear what made it good,
or even great, and that was made evident by the consensus of all
the authors. With others, it was much more difficult to discern
the exact element that made it go beyond just good to really good.
Sadly, there were some that it was difficult to find anything good
about. And of course there were many that were just okay, which
is actually worse than bad, in my mind. It’s like a wallflower at a
junior high dance; it might have a great personality and be really
fun, but if it’s not exhibiting all those wonderful qualities, it will
rarely be noticed.
So what does make a package really good? I used my own set of
criteria which included :
• Did it make me wish I had designed it? There were several that I
envied and secretly (and now not-so-secretly!) hated the designer for
doing before I even could think of it. In addition, it was great because it
was perfectly appropriate for that client or product.
• Was the design solution smart? Did it solve a problem that competitive
products hadn’t? Was there an aha! moment? Those are rare moments
in design, but finding them is what keeps me trying every day.
• Did the package tell the brand story? We’ve all heard this before…
blah, blah, branding, blah, blah. I wanted to connect with the package
and the brand. I wanted to care to find out more and then be rewarded
for taking the time.
• Did the design feel authentic and real to that story? On some of the
submissions the design was nice but it didn’t feel like it had a soul, it
didn’t feel real to the product or the brand. It felt like a copy-cat brand.
Honestly with some packages it was a gut feeling, but it was very clear
that others mimicked a competitor.
• Did the package feel like it belonged in the product category, and yet
was unique to the category? Did the product have the visual cues of
its category—for instance, did the milk package look like milk and not
like motor oil?
• Was the package exciting and interesting to look at? Would it compel
me to pick it up or even notice it? This is probably the most subjective
of my criteria and this is precisely why there are four distinctly
different authors for this book. At some point “good package design”
comes down to personal taste.
No, this book isn’t the ultimate doctrine on making a package
really good. It doesn’t give the scientific formula. It doesn’t
have all the answers. But it is a tool that dissects and puts into
words what four authors from various backgrounds think about
packaging. So agree, disagree, hate us or love us, but hopefully,
you will come away with a broader perspective and your own
criteria for what makes a really good package.
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