Brighter designs in darker days

By Scott Montgomery

In hard times, competitive pressure builds, and updating its look is one of the few tools an established brand has to create a buzz.

Why are so many brands making expensive changes now?

Updating a product’s branding —- its packaging, its logo, its look and feel —- seems easy enough. A branding firm arrives with a gorgeous new mock-up of your product, your signs or the tail of your corporate jet, along with reams of supporting data on why your old designs are hopelessly out of step with consumer preference.

You approve, and suddenly, without changing your product in any way, you get to use the most important word in all of commerce: “New.”

Being suddenly “new” is pretty powerful stuff, but there are risks. Calculate the costs of redesigning and reprinting warehouses full of company sales materials. Redesigning Web sites. Changing out building signs. Updating product displays across retail channels. Reprinting forests of business cards. And, perhaps the biggest expense of all, creating the advertising to make customers aware —- and receptive —- to the change. Oh, and by the way, you’re doing it all in the middle of the worst economic downturn in recent memory. Risky.

There are, after all, no guarantees. Tropicana just spent $35 million with one of these firms for a redesign of its entire retail line of juice products —- complete with screw-caps cleverly retooled to feel like the skin of an orange —- that was so roundly criticized by its consumers that the entire endeavor was scrapped within weeks of appearing on shelves. That’s a $35 million logical, clever and systematic process crashing down harder and faster than a runway model in a viral video.

So why change? And more importantly, why now?

Bad times or good, the reason’s the same —- pressure. Competitive pressure, pressure from demographic changes, changes in customer behavior. It’s just that, now, marketers feel a whole lot more of it.

Updating a branding is one of the precious few controls a marketer has to create “energy” and “news” around an established brand. But it has to be more than just a logical, clever and systematic undertaking. Will change enhance the story the brand embodies without losing sight of its history?

Products have important heritages, and consumers can have strong connections to familiarity. Among the winning retail brands in this downturn is Campbell’s Soup, whose packaging would be recognizable to shoppers from half a century ago. So why are other familiar grocery store brands such as Pepsi and Heinz making changes?

Among these rebrands, I think we are seeing a trend toward simplicity. Coke removed all the graphic bubbles, bars and arcs to create a very bold, back-to-basics can. Pepsi nearly mimics Barack Obama’s campaign brand, whose simplicity and elegance was appealing. Now each can is a simple, blue campaign poster. Odd logo, powerful can.

Heinz recently broke with long-standing tradition and removed the pickle graphic from its ketchup bottles to make room for its new positioning statement, “Grown Not Made.” At first this seems logical, clever and systematic —- after all, ketchup is full of tomatoes, not pickles. But they may have lost a small but important thing along the way. Practically all their competitors have a big tomato on the package, so there’s one less point of differentiation there now. More importantly, the pickle was odd and unique —- when I was a kid, there was this little mystery on the label to solve —- what was this pickle? And 57 varieties of what? It created curiosity and invited me to learn more about the product. That’s called a “consumer engagement” these days, and brands want that as much as anything else.

Of course, If any of these rebranding efforts are to truly succeed in this economy, they’ll have to be more than logical, clever and systematic. They’ll have to create more consumer engagement.

> Scott Montgomery is a principal and executive creative director at Bradley and Montgomery in Indianapolis.