An Interview with Anthem Worldwide's Ted Leonhardt, Ron Vandenberg, and Chris Plewes

by Patrick Henry

Is developing the creative for package design the same thing as engineering? Of course not. Can engineering be a metaphor for successful package design? Anthem Worldwide has built an international business in package design strategies upon the premise that it can.

Don't get Ted Leonhardt, Ron Vandenberg, and Chris Plewes wrong: These outspoken senior executives of Anthem value the special place of the creative imagination in package design as highly as anyone else. However, the three men—the firm's president, creative director, and managing director of its Toronto office, respectively—give as much weight to every other step in a highly systematized workflow that governs each Anthem project, as Leonhardt says: "From the pencil end of the creative process" to sign-off by the client.

Fine—but how well can a fundamentally aesthetic activity like package design really work when flow charts, not sketch pads, are paramount?

Well enough to have made Anthem Worldwide's entry the clear winner in the Package Design Makeover Challenge, a contest in which the readers of this magazine voted for their favorites in a field of five proposals to update the packaging of a manufacturer of specialty foods.

Well enough to have built Anthem Worldwide, a business unit of Schawk Inc., into a multinational brand agency that handled more than 5,000 packaged-goods SKUs last year.

Well enough, claims Vandenberg, to enable Anthem to "reinvent every package in every category" if called upon to do so (although he, Leonhardt, and Plewes are the first to insist that reinvention for its own sake is never a good idea).

As these spokesmen describe it, Anthem Worldwide is both a laboratory and an assembly line for transforming the profession of package design. Expressing a brand, they say, is the common objective of teams rather than the isolated work of individuals. In their view, a good strategic thinker with average artistic skills has as much to stir into to the creative mix as the most gifted draftsperson. Above all, they contend that package design—like feature film production—is a chain of events that can be managed at every stage for predictable and satisfying results.

Focus on deliverables, not activities

"There's a way to systematize the design business," says Vandenberg, who is based in Anthem's San Francisco office. It's a matter, he says, of "getting the right thinking at the right time" by bringing team players and their talents to bear precisely where they're needed as the project progresses. If that means being more specific to the "what" than to the "how" of the work, so be it. "We try to be very clear about what each person's deliverable is, as opposed to their activity," notes Vandenberg. "We diagram the process and post it so that everyone in the studio can see it."

According to Plewes, design firms that don't map the deliverables all but guarantee that they'll fall short of producing what their clients really want. Some firms, he says, are good at doing the core design work, but they get bogged down when trying to coordinate design with the other steps in the process. Others are great at strategy, but not as good at translating strategy into design. Thus are heard, he says, the common complaints about design firms that lack a systems-oriented approach like Anthem's: "They had a cool idea, but it wasn't practical," or "It's a great design, but it can't be printed," or "It doesn't work in flexo."

Leonhardt agrees that a common problem in the industry is wasting wonderful designs by wrapping them in useless digital files that don't support, for example, all of the substrates the job requires. Then "weeks go by in finger-pointing contests" that waste even more money and time. This is why Anthem believes, says Leonhardt, that "having an eye to efficiency does not reduce creativity"—it protects the integrity of the project by defining its parameters and detailing the responsibilities of everyone involved.

This well-oiled-machine attitude makes sense for a design agency that is a part of one. Anthem's parent company, Schawk Inc., is a $200 million, publicly held prepress company that claims to count most of the world's multinational consumer packaged goods manufacturers as its clients. Besides brand consulting and design, Schawk offers pre-production graphic services as well as solutions for digital asset management and 3D imaging.

Anthem Worldwide, operating from eight offices in North America and Asia, is "completely linked with Schawk for end-to-end brand strategy and development," says Leonhardt, who joined the company last January after a long tenure with The Leonhardt Group, a brand design consultancy that he founded and later sold. From San Francisco, he directs a staff of 135, about 20 percent of whom are package designers. The team serves brand owners and chain retailers with high-profile names like Nestlé, Smirnoff, Albertsons, and Wal-Mart.

More resources, fewer surprises

Anthem calls itself "the only strategic brand and packaging design consultancy offering global marketers a proven, fully synchronized, seamless brand design solution," and it is Leonhardt's job to ensure that the "fully synchronized, seamless" part always rings true. Leonhardt says that the whole reason Anthem was built was to take advantage of the potential for streamlined synchronicity made possible by the global resources of Schawk. The parent company's ability to manage a job from concept through printing guarantees predictability in quality, schedules, and costs. For Leonhardt, making every job predictable is what fulfills the promise, makes Anthem unique, and keeps its clientele loyal.

Vandenberg sees the objective as "getting the best work to market in the most efficient way"—a challenge that requires not only creative prowess but equal deftness in production, distribution, and the other moving parts of a successful product introduction. With customers, competitors, and investors watching, speed-to-market pressure is always a factor to deal with—but not to surrender to.

It's not just about speedy turnarounds, according to Plewes. The question is, he says, "How quickly can you do it properly?" No matter how tight the time frame, you still need to know where you're going strategically. Some projects can be completed in as little as 10 weeks, with the first-round creative taking place "in a matter of days." On the other hand, projects requiring "retooling" and "culture shifts" on the client's end could take a year or longer. The design firm must also be ready to "shift speeds to meet clients' needs," counsels Plewes.

Sometimes, agrees Leonhardt, "interfacing with the client changes everything." In some projects, he says, "we could easily do the creative inside of a month, but there are always a million issues that have to do with the reality of the assignment." Instead of artificially quickening the pace, Anthem prefers to study the client's workflow as well as its own, increasing efficiency by showing where steps can be combined or eliminated. As a result, Leonhardt says, "we think that we're the fastest to market without any reduction in quality."

Anthem knows that there are never any quick or pat answers about the kinds of packaging consumers will accept in a given category. Leonhardt says that this is why, when the team strategizes a brand design, "we are very interested in the process of understanding the nuances of difference from one category to another." Plewes points out that designers risk "running hot and cold" with consumers if their concepts remain rigidly the same for all retail environments and shopping experiences.

"Holism" is the touchstone

"It's all about connecting with the consumer," he says, by replacing a cookie-cutter approach with a creative vision that treats the brand "holistically": as the sum of many parts that are "finely tuned and performing as a collective." When designers respect the core values of the parent brand in its variations across the product line, they reward the client with a much more living and vital brand. Holism of this kind, Plewes acknowledges, is not always easy for owners of national brands to grasp, as they tend to market "from the top down" and impose design requirements in the same way.

Nor is the question of brand identity an easy one to call. High visibility on today's crowded retail shelves is essential, but, as Plewes observes, "Sometimes standing out is not as important as fitting in. You don't necessarily want it to be the first thing that they see—you want it to be the thing that they buy."

Vandenberg says that a package's "clarity of verbal and visual message" is what influences shoppers, not its flamboyance. He notes that category-leading "heritage brands" like Heinz Ketchup stay in front by changing little or not at all. Other brands can profit from being updated or refreshed from time to time. Then there are "trend packages"—rule-breakers that Vandenberg calls capable of "creating a new design language, redefining the category, and leading the pack." Designers love working with trend packages, but love's labor could be lost on brand owners who might see a radical makeover as risky to well established brand equities.

Therefore, says Vandenberg, the strategic priority is to decide whether the package should break ground as a trendsetter or more conservatively mimic the brand leader in its category. Imitating the category leader means proceeding with caution when the assignment is to create a private-label brand—a class of products that accounts for a significant share of Anthem's work. Vandenberg points out that while a chain retailer might want a "house" version of a top-selling, nationally branded product it carries, the resemblance must not be so close that it ruffles the owner of the predominating brand.

Some call it handholding

Decisions, decisions: It's no bed of roses being the owner of a brand or the prospective launcher of one. One of Anthem's most important responsibilities to its clients, says Leonhardt, is making sure they see "all of the possibilities within the category that make sense." This sometimes involves helping them to "deal with it emotionally—it's not just an intellectual exercise."

Plewes says that Anthem can confront a brand with detachment and objectivity: "We don't live in the brand every day. We're not encumbered by the numbers, the manufacturing details, or the organizational culture of the brand owner, so we can balance and prioritize the issues." When it has to, he continues, Anthem can be "relatively ruthless" in spelling out a clear and compelling message aimed squarely at consumers. Plewes urges clients to remember that consumers as a group are "selfish and self-serving"—they want to know what's implicit in the packaging message for them, not how the brand owner is trying to finesse the details.

No designer likes to speak in specifics about projects that went awry, but Anthem's executives are forthcoming with general advice for avoiding creative misfires. Most basically, says Plewes, the product "has to be a credible idea to the consumer." Failure occurs "when core elements of a product idea don't fit together," betraying a lack of cohesiveness that puts consumers off.

Once again, the polestar is holism: achieving a design that interlocks the quality of the product, the practicality of the package, the trustworthiness of the brand, the clarity of the message to the consumer, and the creative team's understanding of the assignment. When these elements fail to align, the whole can't exceed the sum of its parts, and the launch probably will not succeed. When speed-to-market is the overriding concern, adds Plewes, "it's too easy for the complete, holistic solution not to happen. If you focus totally on speed-to-market without pausing to examine your creative strategy, you go off the rails."

Inside the chalk outline

Vandenberg likens analyzing a failed launch to "solving a murder case" in which the prime suspect is poor planning. He says that in most projects that don't work out, "things were never really firmed up." Lacking explicit marching orders, people opt for compromises that tend to subvert even the best of intentions—another reason why, according to Vandenberg, "management of the process is absolutely critical." The process is one of "distillation" that reduces the message to a few essential elements. Vandenberg believes in limiting the elements on a package: "You can never get more than three things done." That is, a package cannot successfully communicate more than three pieces of vital information about the product to the consumer.

Creatives willing to work in teams to distill broad strokes of imagination into discrete units of information are the kinds of people who perform best in an environment like Anthem's. Vandenberg says that the company prefers to work with "system thinkers" who can take a brand concept and articulate it into all of the different forms and sizes that a product's packaging requires. The process is collaborative from end to end. "Everyone on the design team works on something to hand over to the next person," Vandenberg says. "The deliverables are always clear, and everyone gets a chance to contribute where they are strongest."

It follows that a willingness to collaborate is a sine qua non for career success at Anthem. If you are an Anthem associate, Leonhardt says, "you must understand that you're a contributor on a team. No prima donnas allowed." Those who get the message earn this encouragement from Vandenberg: "Package design has moved from being an individual pursuit to a team play. If you can work within a highly diversified group of people with skills very different from yours, we want you."

Plewes puts in a word for what he calls "performance mentality" in designers. "Can they engineer a creative solution designed to deliver on a functional and an aesthetic level," he asks, as opposed to "just throwing off ideas because they're cool?" He acknowledges that the Anthem mindset is as he describes it: "engineered." But that mindset is precisely what has enabled the company to develop thousands of great packages for scores of grateful clients. Plewes is proud of the Anthem mindset: "It gets done. It works. It delivers great creative that's geared to perform."

Package Design Makeover Challenge Yields a Winner And a Barrel Full Of Great Design Ideas for Bilinski's

The year was 1929. Joseph Bilinski, a Ukrainian immigrant who'd settled in Cohoes, N.Y., started making sausage, kielbasa, and other Old World meat products in his garage. He later opened a home-based retail outlet and in the 1940s built a local manufacturing plant. Today, that plant is operated by the Schonwetter family, the present owners of the Bilinski Sausage Manufacturing Co.

Since taking over in 1983, the Schonwetters expanded and modernized the plant and added a new series of all-natural products to the traditional meat products line, including the first all-natural chicken sausage. Growing a business often doesn't leave a brand owner much time to ponder the look of the brand, so when Package Design invited Bilinski's to be the centerpiece of its first Makeover Challenge earlier this year, eight years had passed since the last major design changes.

"The Makeover Challenge came at an opportune time," says Stacie Waters, COO of Bilinski's and daughter of president Steve Schonwetter. "We'd been struggling with the problem of finding a consistent brand image for both the all-natural and the traditional lines. We wanted to simplify the design, add graphics, and project a cleaner image for our all-natural products."

Teams of package designers from five creative groups submitted fully developed proposals for revitalizing the look of Bilinski's product lines. The entries were depicted in the July/August issue of Package Design and presented in interactive 3D models on the magazine's Web site, where readers and Web surfers could vote for their favorite overall redesign.

The favorite by a definitive margin was the entry from Anthem Worldwide, which proposed notable changes both to package formats and to package graphics. Anthem's Chris Plewes thinks that his team's bid captured readers' fancy because they saw it as a "smart solution" that outdid the other entries in meeting the challenge strategically, creatively, and structurally.

Plewes says the Bilinski's line comprises "a very complex combination of products that at first glance seemed to be all the same thing until you saw the different nuances among the products." The Anthem team realized that a different mindset applies to the consumer's experience of each product. This is why, Plewes explains, Anthem's design for the pickled smoked sausage jar has a "masculine tone" that is "Old World looking," the frankfurter package bears a "more approachable, all-family look," and the chicken sausage container conveys the "wholesome, natural appearance" that the Schonwetters wanted.

The Schonwetter family was pleased by all of the exceptional Makeover Challenge entries, but, as it happens, the Schonwetters' favorite entry is not the same as the one chosen by the majority of Package Design voters. According to Waters, the company was most taken with the submission from Webb Scarlett deVlam. As agreed by all parties involved, the Schonwetters can pick and choose elements or ideas they like from any or all the entries in their own redesign strategy. Waters says that an across-the-board Bilinski brand redesign is a distinct possibility, incorporating many of the great ideas from all of the entries together with special touches of the family's own devising.

Waters salutes all of the entrants for rising smartly to the occasion in the Package Design Makeover Challenge. "They all tried to draw the continuity between our two lines," she says, "and they understood our need to make customers realize that both lines come from the same manufacturer."