1. The NAME should ideally capture the proposition with personality and emotion. You should feel something when you say it, and that something should have a clear link to the proposition: Innocent, Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar, Upbeat, Brew Dog, Dorset cereals, Absolut, GU, Bonne Maman. The list goes on, but the not so relevant name list is a lot longer.

At the very least the name should be capable of being injected with personality and emotion through design: Arizona Ice Tea, Vitamin Water.

2. The BOTTLE (or any container) is a huge part of your branding – again it can communicate proposition, personality and emotion. Look no further than Coke, but that also has history and a zillion dollars of ads behind it. For a new drink the container (size, form, label and cap materials) provides both belonging (it’s one of those) and potentially differentiation. Tall vs wide, straight vs curved, clear vs sleeved, shiny vs matt, generic vs unique, all say something about what’s inside. Make sure that’s the right thing. If the container is generic, try to create a level of customisation, eg Rockstar has black can tops and jewel like ring-pulls. Sensation transference (look it up) is a hugely powerful tool – packaging attributes become transferred into product and brand perception.

3. GRAPHIC design should give personality and meaning to the brand, and also a clear hierarchy to the messages. Looking at the brand logo (the brand name written in stylised form, plus any colours, shapes or symbols associated with it), what can the consumer deduce about the brand’s purpose and personality? Does it work on a T-shirt, without the support of the container? Does the logo build on the name to finesse the brand’s proposition and personality?

4. The HIERARCHY of messages refers to the order in which the (potential) consumer decodes (not reads) the information, so forms, colours and symbols should have already set the scene before any words are involved. Reading the logo plus product description plus a pay-off or strapline should now express what the brand is, does, and stands for. Never try to say more than three things, the consumer doesn’t have time or processing power for levels 4,5 or 6.

5. Tell a STORY. Our brains are wired for stories and the one we tell ourselves daily is ‘this is the kind of guy/gal I am’. How does your brand story fit with mine, your target (old school) or hero (much better) consumer?

Follow all these rules (or stick them in your design brief), and you have a fighting chance of becoming the next Tapped, Coco Face or Cawston Press.

More insights on packaging and branding can be found on Steve’s blog.

But there is a slight problem – cool, hand-made hipster branding that avoids all the cliches of traditional ‘big’ brands certainly stands out when it’s the only example on display. But when every Tom, Dick and Harry has a designer protein shake, gluten-free quinoa muesli or ‘saison’ beer on the shelf, they can all start to look a bit, er, alike.

This is not a new phenomenon. Looking back at the design and advertising styles of the early 20th century, when the very idea of branding was new, we see a similar issue. In those days brands symbolised their superior quality by commissioning ornate hand-made typography and illustrations, often of pale-complexioned women and children in expensive attire. This must have made a welcome change from previously boring, functional packaging and advertising. Consumerism was up and running.

Now, after a century or more of incredible advances in our understanding of consumer psychology and in the technology of communication, we may have come full circle.

According to a recent blog about emerging packaging trends from the most visited website on package design in the world, the dieline, the trend towards ‘visual authenticity’ marks a complete rejection of established corporate brand design.

The dieline’s founder Andrew Gibbs reports that: ‘Gen Z consumers demand a real, trusted, human connection to the products and the brands that they consume. This connection can be expressed in different ways, from a connection to nature, to the written word, to the past, or simply to other people. This is beyond hipster. This style is a rejection of technology; a pre-computer era style, if you will.’

The style may be pre-computer era, but the way in which it is taking over our labels and cartons is anything but. The digital age and its harbinger the internet have created the conditions for thousands of start-up brands and start-up designers to flourish, discover one another, and get their products onto people’s shopping lists.

Just as it is possible to Google pretty much anything and find a choice of suppliers around the globe able to deliver it the next day for a competitive price, so brand owners can find an unlimited source of ‘off the peg’ photography, illustration and typography for a few dollars a throw.

Of course no self-respecting design agency uses this stuff, but the fact that so much high quality, pretend-authentic, retro-cool design is available to every new cup-cake maker in the world highlights the branding problem: Why would consumers believe any of it?

The fact is that just because access to good-looking visuals has increased exponentially, there is still only room in the consumer’s brain for a handful of brands worth paying attention to.

Lovely design alone does not make that happen, so the role of the skilled brand designer is even more in demand. Brand design isn’t about how many exquisitely-crafted typefaces and illustrations you can squeeze in, it’s about how well you tell the brand story and connect with the emotional desires of people.

That being said, there is no doubt that the craft brand phenomenon is influencing every design brief being written right now. Five years ago it might have read: ‘Do me an innocent’. Today it’s more like: ‘Make my brand look more accessible, natural and human. Show that we care about the ingredients too. Did I mention ‘cool’?’

As a result we are seeing all the big brands falling over themselves to drop their photoshop fantasies of perfect products, and get out the pencils, stencils, blobby paintbrushes and rubber stamps.

But the challenge is bigger than that. Your brand isn’t innocent, or Brew Dog, or dorset cereals. It needs to be itself, and tell its own story. That story (along with the product, if necessary) will need to evolve, to embrace the connections that we know consumers are seeking.

Chances are you’ve already got many of these in the locker, but never thought they were important. So dust off that history and that natural recipe. Find and highlight the passion points of your brand story. No hipsters required, least of all at your design agency.

I’ll be showcasing examples of established brands finding their craft mojo (or not) in my ‘Shelf Life’ blog. You can sign up for updates here.

Our work for Dutch craft baker Van den Berg has just been published here.

Original article was published in Linkedin

When I was a kid soft drinks were available in two forms: fizzy and squash. Squash came in orange, blackcurrant and lemon flavours and was boring, while ‘pop’ had loads of fabulous flavours including dandelion & burdock, cherry and cream soda but was, according to my parents, unaffordable. Getting hold of the mythical ‘Coca-Cola’ was about as likely as my Dad coming home in a Bentley.

Times have changed a bit since then. Entirely new categories of soft drinks have been created by the unstoppable forces of capitalism and innovation: Bottled water, energy drinks, juice drinks, diet drinks, smoothies, ice teas, isotonic drinks, wellness drinks, brewed soft drinks and so on, and on, and on.

How on earth does the consumer decide which of these to drink, and when? More importantly for the purposes of this article, how can an entrepreneur with yet another great idea for a drink get it noticed?

The consumer is King. And Queen

The first principle of marketing is to start with the consumer and their needs, but surely with all that stuff on the shelf there can’t be any needs left, can there?

Actually there are plenty. Not in the sense of actually quenching a thirst, perhaps, but people’s ‘needs’ in our consumer society have moved on. We can nearly all afford pop (even Coca-Cola), but what we choose isn’t so much about price any more. It’s about defining who we are.

Of course this isn’t limited to soft drinks, or drinks in general. We define who we are by what car we drive (or by not driving), what perfume we wear, what smartphone we bury our heads in and even which brand of granola we eat. Brands are the currency of identity, even when we shop at Lidl and purport to avoid their siren call.

But where does that leave our ‘Drinkpreneur’? Creating a brand, not a product, I would argue. If new products fail 80% of the time (you choose your favourite statistic), then in 90% of those cases I would say it was because no real brand existed.

Your brain wants a story

When people see a new product with new things to offer, the first thing they need is a reference. What KIND of product is this? Who makes it? Do I trust them? How will consuming this make me feel? How will it make me look?

These questions are not consciously asked, of course. They are asked – and answered in milliseconds – by our subconscious ‘System 1’ circuits before we are even aware that we were thinking about buying something.

Yet something must have triggered our attention in the first place, so what was it?

The neuroscience tells us that we are attracted to objects and communications by association; something in the environment evokes a need we are subconsciously carrying around, and we pay attention. At this point our brain goes into overdrive to assign it a category, a function, a personality. It simply has to know.

But because System 1 has evolved to be lazy (why waste time and energy actually thinking?), it looks for the quickest way to understand all of this new stimulus together, as a bundle.

It turns out that the most efficient way to for it to do this is to make up a story, so it helps if we’ve already designed one into the packaging. And real brands have better stories than products with a name and some claims.

Let’s look at a few high profile examples:

A perfect packaging story

When this packaging hit the shelves it changed the rules not just for soft drinks but arguably for all food packaging. Its job was to define a smoothie, an entirely new category of drink (more a nutritious snack, actually), and to establish the innocent brand as its new leader.

The first thing System 1 notices is a cute little bottle with a pure and simple form. Despite its small size the wide mouth and fulsome shoulders make it look packed with richness. The shape is familiar, and a quick memory check identifies it as an old-fashioned milk or juice bottle, ticking the ‘wholesome goodness’ box.

The label has no fruit pictures on it, just a childlike character that reinforces the meaning of the name – angelic, naive and pure. The paper stock is a tactile and unbleached, which System 1 knows is associated with raw, unprocessed ingredients.

The little ‘blip’ in the label shape attracts attention but also has hidden meaning – it had to be ‘cut out’, so this brand has taken care of the product.

We need System 2 to do any actual reading so here goes: ‘Cranberries and raspberries’. Those sound like the actual fruits, and on the back of the pack there’s an even more unfamiliar landscape. The ingredient list contains cute illustrations of fruits and tells me how many of each: ‘27 cranberries, 15 raspberries, etc.’ The company address is ‘Fruit Towers’ and they want you to call them on a banana phone?

Every element of this packaging design builds an incredibly rich brand story, with no need for advertising or even a website. Of course they had a grass-covered van, cool events and fantastic PR, all of which were part of the story that was already deeply encoded in this pack.

Years later, and then partly owned by Coca-Cola, they took on Tropicana in the juice market, once again using packaging (an elegantly-sculpted carafe) to tell an instantly recognisable story for System 1 to decode (fresh juice on the breakfast table).

‘Power up’ packaging

Here’s the design that defined another new category – energy drinks. What does System 1 make of this on first sight?

The can is slimmer than normal soft drinks, so it’s more of a concentrate, or perhaps a ‘dose’. Thanks to the silver and blue sharps it looks more like engine oil than a drink, reminding my subconscious of fuel. There’s a mini-explosion of red and yellow at the centre of the pack, and the name Red Bull, suggesting aggression and power.

Red Bull is a world leader in content marketing, yet even without its sponsorship of Formula One and a panoply of extreme sports, this pack tells my brain an innovative yet decodable story.

Now that we’ve all learned the codes of energy drinks (check out some competition here and here), Red Bull has developed a portfolio of products to satisfy consumer demand for more flavour choices.

But rather than use the famous core brand design and somehow introduce colour codes (this would dilute the brand power, though it has been done for low- and no-sugar variants), the brand has introduced a totally new design system for special editions.

These are elegant designs in their own right, but only understandable in the context of Red Bull’s global fame. Therefore this is not a path I would recommend to a Drinkpreneur until after you’ve done the same.

Shrink to fit

The ability to sleeve any shape of bottle has radically transformed the innovation potential of soft drinks. Labels need a decent amount of flat surface which of course restricts the shapes designers can create; but whilst all bottles need some technical restrictions to run down a filling line, sleeving permits all kinds of compound curves and thus storytelling metaphors that were previously unattainable.

Somewhat ironically this bottle does not need to be sleeved at all, but when Arizona decided to use this new tool they used it in spades, creating a 3-dimensional canvas of bright patterns and intricate illustrations that cover every millimeter.

Both the bottle shape and graphic style have a charming naivety to them that suggests a slightly hippy, natural, even organic lifestyle. And all this using acres of stretched plastic – I told you System 1 was lazy.

In exchange for all this design real estate you need to give up seeing the product, but that’s not always a bad thing if the gallon bottle is anything to go by (enough to make me instantly stop believing the Arizona story). But on the plus side, it’s a design language that perfectly suits another bane of the designer’s life, the 6-can shrink sleeve.

Hydration stations

In many ways water represents the peak of the storytelling prowess of packaging. I could wax lyrical all day about the way Evian added a mountain of value to natural spring water, but in some ways the packaging of functional waters is even more impressive.

Over recent years we’ve all had health management messages drummed into us, about fat, cholesterol, sugar, diabetes, anti-oxidants, free radicals and of course hydration. Great, but just you try drinking 2 litres of tap water a day.

But once I’ve decided to be that person who ‘looks after himself’, my System 1 doesn’t need to be asked; it’s already looking for signals in the environment to help me.

Despite its descriptive name (The Glaceau brand is a subtle but essential endorsement), vitamin water hits all the hot buttons. Inside it’s plain water with a few readily available metabolites and a nice colour added. But with the extra power of packaging, it’s an Aladdin’s cave of jewel-like pharmaceutical life-boosters!

How does System 1 come to this conclusion? Well let’s start with the bottle, a grabbable handful that’s based on a sports ‘bidon’. The translucent cap appears to merge with the bottle itself, suggesting purity and also design intent, a rather abstract notion that System 1 nevertheless recognises and reads as ‘purposeful’.

The label is large and made of a loose-fitting, plasticky material that has ‘technology’ written all over it: Both metaphorically through its form, and literally because of the pharmaceutical codes of detailed instructions and info panels, largely spelled out in serious black and white.

I’m seeing a drinkpreneurial rival in many UK stores at the moment, from a brand called ‘Get More’. This is an eye-catching bottle thanks to its use of the ‘window to the back label’ strategy.

That arouses my curiosity, and I’m willing to fire up System 2 to check out the messaging – yep, it’s vitamin water.

However the slender curvaceous bottle sleeved in white with primary colour codes doesn’t feel very ‘watery’. The window itself reminds me of a stomach or maybe a kidney, hence highly functional, yet the typography and name ‘Get more’ don’t quite add up to a convincing pharmaceutical story.

It’s not for my System 1, but I can sense its appeal to women looking for a nudge in the right direction, as they pick up a healthy meal deal for lunch.

The soft drinks world is extremely dynamic and new concepts, products and brands are constantly appearing on the shelf. I spend a lot of my time wandering through supermarkets, looking for ideas that have ‘caught my eye’ from shelves that are simply laden with wannabe innovation.

What’s your story?

As a consultant I will look at the good, the bad and the ugly in an attempt to understand ‘what the brand is trying to say to me’. As a consumer I’m only interested when System 1 whispers: “Yes, this is what you’ve been looking for”.

Here’s a typical scene in Drinkpreneur land, a range of healthy drinks from two different categories. I’m seeing the generic, the unpronounceable, the invisible, and the artificial.

But one or two are clearly standing out with a motivating story that I can relate to. Make that your target and your innovation just might fly.

You can find a lot more analysis of how packaging encodes brand stories and how these perform on the shelf in my blog, ‘Shelf Life’, available here.