Package Design | packagedesignmag.com

(April 2011) posted on Wed May 04, 2011

By Patrick Henry

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Steve Jobs. Martha Stewart. Sir Richard Branson. As entrepreneurs whose personal celebrity is all but impossible to separate from the public image of their companies, they have a common ancestor in Frank Perdue.
Perdue, as almost nobody in the B2C professions needs to be reminded, was a visionary who took a commodity food product and branded it with himself—a stroke of marketing genius that would transform Perdue Farms from a modest family business into the third-largest poultry company in the U.S. Along the way, the look of its packaging has become so ingrained with shoppers that any attempt to change it might be seen as a high-risk game of “chicken.”
But that doesn’t apply to a brand that expects its packaging to evolve along with its ongoing efforts to optimize the quality and the customer appeal of the products inside. A redesign that went into effect this year respects both tradition and innovation as it supplements tried-and-true branding elements with carefully considered additions that articulate the renewed brand promise in full.
The overarching goal, says Gail McWilliam, senior marketing director, Perdue Farms, was “elevating” the product with a graphical refresh. That message was to be delivered, adds John Bartelme, Perdue’s chief marketing officer, with a design that ascribed a “higher order of benefits and attributes to the product line.”