JKR

M&S are letting us know they are competitive. Makes sense. But doing it in such a functional and unalluring manner throws all the equities they have built up as the UK’s premier “food porn” merchant in the bin. And when it’s done at the same time that they are stocking other brands for the first time, perhaps M&S equities are getting fuzzy? It’s another example of how focussing on price, price and price while failing to capitalise on more emotive brand values leads to forgettable communication. While the supermarkets engage in an arms race which forces them to discount, the brand name products are again let off the “switch and save” hook.

When the upturn arrives the supermarkets will have failed to convince us they are much more than competitively priced grocers. Interesting that out of all of this, Waitrose Essentials approach is being imitated and challenged because it played back to preconceptions around their brand (in a visually appealing way) and so was a notable success.

Above, for the style conscious but penny-wise man about town, a styling gel which squeezes every last drop from the pack and is styled in an engagingly utilitarian manner. And below, for the style conscious but less frugal oligarch about town, “L’Essence de Courvoisier”. A nice drop of brandy produced with Baccarat and a team of “thirty skilled craftsmen”. The liquid is suspended in an innovative teardrop, and the stopper acts as the diamond on the ring. If you have to ask “how much?”, it might be beyond your pocket as they say…

Both offer proof that, at the value for money and super luxury ends of the scale, structural design can be the most significant way of dramatising the brand’s ethos and usage, and both indicative of the way design is responding to the downturn – not necessarily by going back to basics.

In the week that the makers of Jolt cola petition for bankruptcy protection, citing the principle cause as the threefold price it pays for re-sealable cans over the industry standard ones used by its more famous rivals, we wonder if bespoke structural packaging is in the dock, too?

With the twisted glass bottle a relatively minor format in the UK nowadays, it seems that even when your name is Coca Cola, the dis-economy of scale associated with customised packaging just isn’t sustainable in the today’s competitive environment.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that others have learned this lesson the hard way – even when the consumer gained superior convenience as in the case of Nescafe’s hot can, Stella’s take-home mini-kegs, or Quaker’s short-lived resealable cartons, their sales were minor compared with core formats.

Yet brands shouldn’t give up the pursuit of enhanced tactile or functional packaging. When we worked on the embossed Stella Artois can back in the 1990’s, it provided positive confirmation of its premium status and helped it accelerate away from the pack, one of a number of initiatives that ultimately made it the biggest alcoholic drink by value in the UK. As Stella invests its packaging pounds in new initiatives like the chalice glass, it has withdrawn its embossed can, while Heineken has taken the mantle with its outstanding barrel can, one of several pieces of quality packaging that have helped the company re-position it at the premium end of the beer market.

So, although high cost custom packaging may ultimately become a luxury one can’t afford, it certainly has a valuable role to play in catalysing brand renovation, something we can all raise a glass to!

This article has been written by Andy Knowles, jkr.

Along with generic price war advertising, supermarkets are all promoting their own value lines, which generally share a common design aesthetic…

When launching a line of hundreds of products to be dotted about a giant supermarket it clearly makes sense to go for a simple and impactful design system. And using one’s brand colours makes equal sense. And if you are selling a “no frills” line then the easiest way to communicate your proposition is to get rid of the visual frills. But does such an approach, taken to extremes, look so basic that it devalues both the products and the store?

I won’t forget an impassioned argument put forward at a jkr company chat by designer Martin Francis a few years ago, where he laid into value own label packaging for looking not just cheap but ugly. His point was not a designer lovey one – rather he was saying that everyone, no matter what they are spending, deserves to have nice looking packs – why make folk feel like they are getting the cheapo rubbish with design to match? Making the basics range look more attractive might confuse a “good, better, best” strategy, but I suppose there are degrees of design refinement that can be applied. At the other extreme of the product spectrum Chanel No. 5′s box is simple and basic but it has enough nuance to also be beautiful. Still, Coco wasn’t stuck with making a bright yellow pack look appealing.

John Ruskin, who thought deeper and knew more than most of us ever will about aesthetics, was a progressive champion of the importance of art and beauty for the “common man” – although his writing came before the age of the soundbite, so I’ll leave the last words to him. “A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.”

Rights owner Chorion, the home of such children’s favourites as Noddy, OLIVIA and the Mr Men has seen annual sales lift by more than a third to £53.7 million. According to Chorion’s chairman, in Monday’s Guardian, “when things get tougher, people veer towards the things they know and love. It’s a lot like comfort eating”.

This is clearly true and is driving the slew of brands and branded activity invoking childhood nostalgia. The Guardian itself spent last week reprinting old kids’ comics as a giveaway. But it feels like the opportunity to face hard times with brave and inspiring design is being lost in this avalanche of mawkish behaviour. Adults are boosting Chorion’s profits, with the likes of “Little Miss Chatterbox” helping to sell 1m Mr Men t-shirts a month in the States. We are becoming a culture of big babies, and branding is playing its part in dumbing us all down. But one can’t argue with sales success, and as Chorion’s chairman notes “ Noddy has been through the recession many times before”.

Our prediction in January that recession is an auspicious time to invest in a brand’s future is looking hollow, though it was not unfounded. In September’s “best global brands” edition of Business Week, they point to the high proportion of famous campaigns created during times of economic challenge. A quarter of the post 1945 ads in Advertising Age’s “top 100 ad campaigns of the 20th century” were launched in a recession. For example BMW’s “the ultimate driving machine” was born in the oil crisis of 1974. It’s still paying dividends for the brand today. Martin Puris, who came up with the slogan, states in the Business Week article – “I love bad times. In good times people are less apt to try new things. In bad times they have to start to do things better”.

Comfort branding might be tactically savvy, but is it missing the real opportunity? And do we want to be remembered (if we are remembered at all) as the generation of brand communicators who were given opportunities both economic and in new media technologies, but could only look backwards to the past?