Packaging is the ultimate vehicle for design: industrial, graphic, and typographic design are all put to the test to create an impression so meaningful that it converts currency into consumerism. This ...
By Linda Casey
Love craft beer, but don’t have time to make an extra stop to buy your favorite brew from your local pub? If you prefer to buy your suds from a retailer, you’re part of a growing trend. Craft beer sales are shifting from on-premise and keg sales to packaged products at retailers, according to Patrick Rowell, brand strategist at Hornall Anderson.
“The last statistic I saw showed about 5% more retail shelf space for craft beer in 2010 than in 2009,” agrees Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. “All we’re hearing is that craft beers keep getting more and more of that shelf space.”
This is changing the way breweries are valuing their package designs. “The conventional wisdom has always been that craft beers win on product,” says Rowell. “Breweries are starting to come around to see that every craft beer brand out there has fantastic products. When there are so many choices and they’re all good, that’s when brand expression becomes crucial. It becomes the only way you can win categories like this.”
Rowell’s agency recently helped Redhook Brewery redesign its packaging for this new reality. A major component of the redesign was creating striking secondary packaging for retail. To create a positively disproportionate impact in the retail aisle to the number of case and carrier facings, Hornall Anderson designed the secondary packages so they formed a continuous graphic no matter which way the packages are facing.
The agency also found that Redhook, like many other craft beers, were effectively turning away potential customers with its messaging on pack. “The craft category had become so entrenched in pushing back against domestic beer that it became sort of an arms race of who could tell the longest, most flowery, overwrought story on where the hops came from and who brewed it,” Rowell explains. “In the vast majority of the occasions, that’s not how consumers are thinking about it.” So Hornell Anderson stripped away much of the romance copy and simplified the beer description with four keywords stacked in the upper left-hand corner of the bottle.
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