Packaging Emerges as a Key Selling Tool : From Cigarettes to Candy, Designers Prove That Looks Rival Content

When R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. took a picture of a pyramid off its Camel cigarette pack in 1958, loyal Camel smokers steamed.

“They were furious. They insisted we changed the product, even though we hadn’t touched it,” an R. J. Reynolds spokesman said of the company’s attempt to update the package. After thousands of angry complaints and a hefty drop in sales, the company restored the brown triangle and hasn’t tampered with it much since.

Package design, whose importance the Winston-Salem, N.C., tobacco company learned early, has emerged only in the last decade as a primary and indispensable marketing tool for most consumer-goods producers, whether they make soft drinks, shampoos or chocolate-covered raisins. But emerge it has, growing from an industry that 20 years ago comprised a handful of firms with annual sales of several million dollars into one with more than 150 firms garnering more than $1 billion in revenue a year.

With good reason. Taste-tests show that the average person cannot tell the difference between Budweiser, Miller or Michelob once the bottle is taken away. Other tests show consumers believe that orange juice from cartons with a strong orange color tastes better than juice from paler cartons, even when the juice is identical. The results are similar with soft drinks, cigarettes, coffee and a host of other goods.

“Packaging is the product,” said Hollywood-based designer Saul Bass, playing off communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message.”

Critics say that competition based increasingly on package image rather than content adds anywhere from a few cents to several dollars to the cost of an item. But, manufacturers respond, the trend merely reflects consumer desires; it doesn’t create them.

Package design took a back seat to television and print advertising even as recently as the mid-1970s.

Since then, however, producers of consumer items have learned that an appealing label, can or box may be as crucial as a commercial in determining what goes from the shelf to the shopping cart. Companies have discovered that packaging saves money, too, by reducing the amount of advertising needed to introduce or draw attention to new or modified products.

Progressive Grocer, a trade magazine, estimates that in 1983 more than 5,109 new items hit grocery-store shelves. But as the number of new consumer goods has soared, the difference between brands has shrunk. At the same time, the nation’s expanded work force has given consumers--particularly women--less time to shop.

The result is that consumers depend more and more on packaging as a convenient way to pick from the growing array of cold remedies, hand creams and salad dressings they face each time they enter a store.

“Consumer perceptions differentiate products, not the content,” said Robert G. McCready, director of marketing for Landor Associates in San Francisco, which with $25 million in sales last year claims to be the largest package-design firm in the world.

Marketing tests show that while most people can’t tell most brands apart, beer drinkers and other consumers are fiercely loyal to particular brands. “For the average person, it must be psychological,” said Gary D. Klein, president of Klein Associates, a marketing research and consulting firm in Long Beach.

Bayer Aspirin and Ralphs generic aspirin are good examples, he said, because “they are the same except for package and price.”

Pro and Con Arguments

Designers say packaging gives products value in the eye of the beholder, but only the value consumers want to see. Consumer advocates, however, say packaging is a gimmick that manipulates shoppers into seeing greater value where none exists. The issue is hotly contested among marketers and consumer protectionists such as Ralph Nader.

Why would some consumers pay more for an item they could get for less?

“Because they believe they are getting more--and they are,” Klein said. “People drink expensive beer to show off--there’s nothing wrong with that. The person who pays more for Michelob and says he enjoys it more really does enjoy it more, for whatever reason. That person really is getting his money’s worth.”

Even consumers who scorn fancy packaging have inadvertently underscored its importance: Generic brand or plain-wrap packaging is itself a specialty design that was virtually unknown a decade ago.

Can’t Mask Bad Product

Marketers emphasize that no amount of slick packaging can make up for a bad product--a consumer is unlikely to give a lumpy potato mix or flat soda a second chance. They also caution that there will always be a few exceptional consumers who can smell, taste or feel the difference between essentially similar brands. But it is the average consumer who counts.

That, for example, is why Landor Associates decided on gold and silver packages to help the Birds Eye line of frozen vegetables compete with less-expensive store brands. Birds Eye, a division of General Foods, needed “a luxurious package whose foil appearance suggested its contents stay fresher longer” and so justified its higher price in the mind of consumers, Landor Associates reasoned. The strategy worked, and Landor said Birds Eye is holding its own against generic brands.

Designers say the biggest change in packaging has occurred in the last five years as more and more companies strive to have shoppers see their goods as “a family of products.” To accomplish this, producers use a common design and the company logo on each item. The idea is to establish a picture and symbol in the consumer’s mind that will transfer impressions such as freshness and quality to new products--and to foreign markets--with little or no additional advertising.

New Dole Strategy

That was the intention, for example, of Dole Co., a subsidiary of Honolulu-based Castle & Cooke Inc. that is best known for fresh pineapples and canned fruit.

Dole redesigned its familiar red letters and packaging recently in a campaign to expand into such fruit-related products as ice cream and frozen fruit bars. The company hopes--and research suggests--that when consumers see old and new Dole products dressed in packages of similar design, they’ll assume the new products have the same freshness and quality they associate with Dole products they have already tried.

Birds Eye, Pillsbury and Libby’s also buy the notion that shoppers find familiar visual cues convenient and have adopted a similar strategy.

Supermarkets, where generic or store-brand look-alikes compete with successful brand-name products, are largely responsible for the increasing similarity among consumer goods. Consumers once could ask the local druggist, grocer or service station attendant the difference between toothpastes, soups or motor oils. Today self-service rules, leaving consumers to rely on friends, commercials and package labels for information.

‘First Impression’

“Packaging is often the first time you reach the consumer and make a first impression,” said a Procter & Gamble Co. spokesman, adding that the Cincinnati-based company “would not disagree” that the average consumer cannot tell the difference between brands.

Consumers’ tastes also have become more homogenous as the world shrinks and regional differences disappear. Consumers in Nashville, Los Angeles and Paris are more alike than they are different, marketers say. That means that labels such as the red, white and blue Pepsi design, created 15 years ago by Los Angeles-based Jerome Gould & Associates Inc., must send the same message in Tokyo, Berlin or Kansas City.

“Packaging design is a misnomer. It should be renamed packaging communications,” said Clive Chajet, chief executive of Lippincott & Margulies Inc., a New York marketing and design firm. “It’s not a decorative item for the grocery shelf, it’s a matter of projecting an image that will sell.”

Changing Beer Labels

Anheuser-Busch Inc., the St. Louis-based brewer of Budweiser and Michelob, says it believes that quality has made the company a success, but, a spokesman noted, “there’s no question that packaging plays an important role in creating a product image and influencing consumer attitudes.”

The company says it makes subtle changes in all its beer labels on an “ongoing” basis. Since last April, it has been test marketing one beer under two labels: King Cobra and Jaguar.

“Although it is the same product, the same quality, the same ingredients, the King Cobra brand has significantly outsold Jaguar,” the Anheuser-Busch spokesman said. “It was just a more powerful visual image for those beer drinkers.”

Rapid Product Turnover

Depending on the industry examined and the study used, marketers estimate that 50% to 90% of all new products fail. At the same time, the studies show that 80% of the consumer goods on the market today did not exist three years ago. Even familiar products undergo constant change as detergent formulas are “improved” or new yogurt flavors are added.

All these product entries, exits and changes add up to lots of work for package designers. They’ve created a slew of other jobs, too, such as for photographers who specialize in making food look so good that it seems to jump off a package and melt in your mouth.

The typical cost of developing a package design varies with the product, but it can range from a few thousand dollars to several million and can take several months to a year to complete.

Because the package-design industry is not as well documented as the advertising industry, no one knows just what it is worth. Most designers, however, estimate total annual sales are over $1 billion and are growing at an average of 5% to 10% a year.

Success Hard to Measure

Success is also hard to measure. When a company hires a package designer, it often beefs up advertising, too, and the results of both are hard to separate. Nonetheless, many companies are sold on the importance of package design.

During the 1950s and the 1960s, most companies didn’t give packaging much thought. Presidents and product managers often picked designs that pleased their spouses, “or worse, themselves,” Chajet said. Even consumer-product leaders such as Procter & Gamble and White Plains, N.Y.-based General Foods Corp.--companies that have pioneered such ideas as market segmentation and shelf-space positioning--paid less attention to packaging than to other components of consumer marketing, marketers say.

Today, most major companies have in-house product-design directors who do nothing but consider how packages look in the store and hold up under use. For major revisions or a new design, however, most companies go to outside package designers, who they say offer a more objective view of the market.

R. J. Reynolds even commissioned fashion designer Yves St. Laurent to create the box for its new Ritz cigarette, scheduled for test marketing this month in several U.S. cities. “This isn’t a cigarette, this is a designer product,” company spokesman Betsy J. Annese said.

Package designers, like companies, have matured over the years, bringing research and test marketing to what was once an almost purely creative process.

Measurement by Machine

To find out what catches consumers’ attention, designers use machines to measure the eye movement of shoppers looking at a grocery case of frozen goods. Other machines measured how many tenths of a second a shopper must see a design to remember it. Package designers hold discussion sessions with shoppers and watch behind one-way mirrors for reactions to color, label and bottle shape.

Marketing gumshoes have discovered, for example, that frozen-food shoppers look first and foremost for product pictures, then for brand name, then for a one- or two-word description of what’s inside. Only if two photos of halibut look equally appealing, for example, will the average shopper spring for the brand name he or she knows.

By the time designers set pen and ink to paper, they have a carefully prepared list of characteristics a design must convey and an equally detailed list of the colors and symbols they think will do the job. In the end, however, creating pictures and containers that say certain things to target markets is a craft that involves subjectivity and risk.

Role of Intuition

It was intuition backed by research, for instance, that persuaded New York-based Philip Morris Inc. to take the radical step of using black, often associated with death, on its Players cigarette box to connote luxury and sophistication. It worked.

The company goofed, though, by putting diet 7-Up in red bottles. It confused consumers, in whose mind red means “cola.” But popular taste is quirky, and these same consumers insisted 7-Up would not be 7-Up without a small circle or square of red somewhere on the bottle. The red spot was included when the package was revamped.

Package design also involves common sense. “You wouldn’t want to put milk in a sack,” Chajet said. But you just might want ketchup in a plastic squeeze-bottle, as Pittsburgh-based H. J. Heinz Co. is spending tens of thousands of dollars to tell TV watchers. Or toothpaste in one of those new pump dispensers. Or fabric softener with a drip-proof spout.

As these products illustrate, packaging isn’t just on equal footing with commercials. It often is the commercial.

In addition to their role as detective, package designers also act as psychologist, making corporate clients think more clearly about which consumer audience they want to reach--and with what message.

Common Problem

One of the most common package problems is an outdated image that isn’t reaching new audiences. Bass persuaded the Girl Scouts of America, for example, to redesign their cookie box into a “billboard” to tell the public that the Girl Scouts “aren’t just making campfires” but are also keeping up with the changing role of women.

Combining the old with the new is the proven success formula for redesigning existing packages. Loyal consumers recognize it and new consumers see it for the first time. That was the Coca-Cola Co.’s goal when the Atlanta-based firm spent thousands of dollars several years ago to make the lettering and shade of pink on its Tab diet cola can less feminine. The company had discovered that men, too, worry about their weight.

Small package-design changes can save bundles of money in unexpected ways. Procter & Gamble, which will not disclose the names of the package-design firms it uses, bragged to shareholders in its 1983 annual report that it saved $2 million a year by using less orange on its Tide detergent box. Several years earlier, it saved thousands of dollars more by removing a stripe of color from the Pampers disposable diaper box sold in West Germany.

Designing Services

Package designers do not limit themselves to shelf products. They also like to put their stamp on consumer services, and most have found it logical to branch out into helping corporations refashion the company logo and image, too.

Most major airlines, for example, have used them to design waiting rooms and to decorate jets inside and out. Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd. of London, makers of famous Wedgwood china, last year commissioned Jerome Gould to design china for the company’s 225th anniversary.

American Telephone & Telegraph Co. hired Saul Bass in 1966 to update its bell-shaped logo for the Bell System, and then again in 1983 to create a new logo for an AT&T; stripped of its local operating companies. Exxon Corp. called on Bass to redesign its service stations around the world.

“A product is often a consumer’s only window to a corporation,” Bass said. “When you consider that gasoline is a nondescript liquid that smells funny, you have to tell consumers about your company in other ways.”

Walter Landor, the 71-year-old founder of Landor Associates, sums up his attitude about the psychology of package design with a chuckle over Oscar Wilde, who was well ahead of his time when he wrote, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”