Posts Tagged ‘Packaging’

Blue bread, nice.

10.03.2011 – Stephen Holmes

Poster for the newly packaged Warburtons

Here’s the new outdoor advertising to compliment their new TV campaign (you can see one of the ads here, should you bothered to trek through a Flash only site with no deep linking – or another, not as good one, here on Warburton’s own site).

It also shows off their new packaging. Which isn’t great.

Pushing the brand name heavily, ‘fine’.

Having a tagline that seems to be heavily influenced by Wickes (although not quite as good), ‘a bit confusing but ok’.

Lacking family heritage elements (even if that’s what they’re pushing in the TV ads), ‘odd but ok’.

Picking a strong solid colour for the packaging to help shelf standout, ‘fine’.

Making the entire pack blue – ‘bloody weird’.

Blue doesn’t feature too heavily in food (or its packaging) and so is subconsciously (an evolutionary trait) tied to things that one shouldn’t eat. It is also the delightful colour that bread (and other foods) happen to go when they go mouldy. So it looks like you’re selling mouldy bread. Great strategy guys.

A showergel you can drink

11.08.2010 – Stephen Holmes

Over the last few weeks as I’ve been moving around London on the Tube, I’ve seen these lovely little adverts:

Now, I’m sure I’m not the only one that think this is a crap advert for a new range of showergels, but you (and indeed I) would be wrong, they’re even worse than that – they’re crap adverts for a new range of drinks from a company called Neuro. Quite why they’ve been designed to look like bathrooms products I’m not sure, I’d love to have read the strategy document!

But it was only the other day that I saw the product for real (rather than a dodgy 3D rendering) in a shop, amazingly, not one of the ones listed on the advert. And they look like this:

Mmm… nice.

When I’m thirsty, I always reach for a showergel. My heart really goes out to the agency as I can only imagine (hope) that it’s a crap brief that’s lead to this – really dodgy branding and plain weird packaging.

They also appear to come in a variety of ‘flavours’ (benefits?) which I’m sure are really tasty – especially the one called NeuroGasm with its graphic of a woman arched backwards with fireworks. Classy.

Doppelgangers

20.12.2009 – Stephen Holmes

When a company’s product / service is either poor or generic, it’s not uncommon for Marketing Directors to think that the solution to their problem lies in looking like their competition. Sadly this is never a good idea (wouldn’t life be far easier if you could just photocopy someone else’s work?), far better to stand on your own two feet and find some way to make yourself unique and appealing, than to try and dupe punters into buying it by mistake (they’ll never buy you again, deception is rarely an attractive brand trait). And of course, there is always the possibility of a fun (and expensive) court case if you look too alike…

Here are some great recent examples of very similar looking products (market leading vs. own brand).

And a bit more about the pitfalls of (alledgedly) copying someone else, with Diageo suing Sainsbury’s over their Pimm’s ‘copy’.