How to ‘Hit the Touch Points’ with Passion and Precision:
An Interview with Unilever’s Lisa Klauser and Vincent Masotta

By Patrick Henry

The challenge in redesigning the look of the 100-year old Hellman’s brand was to reinforce the line’s unique brand personality while creating a stronger, more consistent global visual identity across a broad range of products.

The mind of the consumer isn’t difficult to fathom. As a package designer, all you have to do is bury yourself in the hodgepodge of needs, tastes, habits, loyalties, and impulses that every shopper carries to the store like coupons crammed into a wallet. Then, like the sculptor in marble who makes a statue of a horse by chipping away everything that doesn’t look like a horse, you use those insights like chisels to cut through the clutter to the shopper’s vision of the perfect package.

Probably no one in packaging at the foods division of Unilever would put it quite this way, but then no member of the team would question the underlying assumption, either.

This visual branding group supports some of the most successful lines in retail food with a design strategy based upon looking at packaging through shoppers’ eyes—a discipline that requires as much imagination as restyling a classic label or prototyping a new foil pouch. At Unilever, the process includes judging how mock-ups look on the shelves of a make-believe, in-house “store.” The process also includes sending package designers to shadow shoppers on trips to real markets.

The Hellman’s Masterbrand redesign included the development of a global brand manual for product marketers.

Lisa Klauser, vice president of integrated marketing capabilities for Unilever’s foods division, and Vincent Masotta, senior design manager, make a convincing case for the Unilever method as they explain why it appears to work so well.

Klauser’s team manages 10 leading Unilever brands, including Hellman’s, Bertolli, Lipton, and Wish-Bone. The team provides marketing services, media planning and buying, event marketing, sampling, and package design and development. The eight-member team, which includes five package design managers, operates out of the visual branding center at Unilever corporate headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Masotta notes that on any given day as many as half a dozen freelance designers could also be at work in the visual branding center, freeing staff designers’ time and increasing the team’s flexibility to manage the workflow.

Brand management by design

The foods division of Unilever has had its own package design department for 20 years. But, says Klauser: “The operation has evolved significantly over the last three years, with the work of our designers becoming more integrated with that of our brand managers.”

Masotta agrees that the division’s approach to package design has become more businesslike and strategic. The general idea, he says, is to “balance new objectives with equities” by harmonizing design goals with the well-established brand appeals of Unilever food products.

But, it’s not just about being rational and objective—there’s room for creative enthusiasm as well. “We are passionate about great design,” Klauser says. “To us, great design means hitting the consumer at every possible touch point.” That happens, she adds, once designers have learned to “understand the visual cues that are key to keeping the brands strong for the consumer.”

Masotta says that in deciding what new and updated packages should look like, the Unilever design team is always careful not to “break that trust”—the purchaser’s faith in brand identity and what that set of characteristics says about the quality of the product.

For help with the all-important task of linking visual cues to consumer touch points, the team can turn to the research resources of what Klauser calls “a pretty robust consumer market insight department.” Market intelligence supplements the group’s continuous conversations with shoppers about their responses to design cues and their reactions to packaging in general.

Even Klauser admits to feeling “astonished” when she considers how much work it takes to keep visual faith with consumers of Unilever food products. She estimates that the design group currently manages more than 1,000 packaging components that consumers see, including those newly spun off from five to 10 launches or major redesigns per year.

Faced with a do-or-die launch deadline, Unilever’s design team developed packaging for 17 SKUs in the Carb Options line in just two weeks.

One reason the number is so large, notes Masotta, is that a package often contains multiple components. For example, in the case of a bottle of Wish-Bone salad dressing, the consumer-facing elements include a neck label, front and back labels, and a printed liner. Each component is a touch point with cues to deliver and behaviors to trigger.

Masotta adds that the task of tweaking packaging components is continuous. This consists of things like removing the word “new” from labels and panels after a product has been successfully launched or repositioned.

Given the volume and the complexity of the workload, says Klauser, the group usually finds that a hybrid approach to task assignment gets the best results. When necessary, teaming Unilever’s uniquely skilled staff designers with outstanding partners in outside package design firms lets design managers choose the best available options for each project.

A new dimension

Masotta says that the group is well equipped to handle most of its internal production requirements, including quick-turnaround color comping. Its most-used design applications are Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat. Apple’s Final Cut Pro is the software of choice for digital video editing, while Eovia Corp.’s Carrara solution fills the bill for 3D modeling, animation, and rendering.

According to Masotta, 3D modeling is an increasingly important tool for package creation at Unilever, which maintains a 3D specialist on the design staff. In many cases, Masotta says, 3D modeling saves considerable time and money as it takes the place of photography by making it possible to substitute three-dimensional simulations for standard shots of actual products.

This can be especially helpful for tasks like building a pallet “in the virtual world” as opposed to assembling and shooting a real pallet. It’s a convincing illusion. When people see the 3D representation, Masotta says: “They don’t know that they’re not looking at a photo.”

In day-to-day operation, the Unilever package design team adds not the illusion but the reality of great speed: the swiftness with which it can respond to breakneck deadlines to gain market-beating competitive advantage.

In some assignments, declares Klauser, “This team can move at the speed of lightning.” She says that lightning struck home early last year after Unilever resolved to be first to market with its line of low-carbohydrate foods—the Carb Options family. These are low-carb versions of products in six of Unilever’s most popular brands (plus a snack collection trademarked with the Carb Options name).

“We saw that the low-carb craze was really starting to heat up,” says Klauser, recalling that a January 2004 launch target had been established as crucial to the line’s success. So, the team rose to the occasion by going from design to realization of packages for 17 SKUs in just two weeks.

Masotta says the team’s flexibility was the reason why they could “divide and conquer” on the Carb Options project, assigning different design managers to various SKUs. “We had a lot of fun with it,” he says.

From brief to shelf

The near-instant turnaround for Carb Options was an exception. Nevertheless, Klauser says, the package development process is accelerating. What once would have taken a year to a year and a half now can be accomplished in about a third of that time. Typically, according to Klauser, a launch takes three to eight months “from the design brief to when the product hits the shelf.”

Each of six foil-pouch packages in the new Bertolli frozen dinners line features a tempting image of the Italian delicacy inside.

But speed isn’t always of the essence. The recent redesign of the packaging for the Hellman’s brand needed and was given a more ample time frame. Because of the brand’s “global powerhouse” status and its imminent 100th anniversary this year, says Masotta, the design phase took six months. This design project also resulted in the development of a global brand manual for use by Hellman’s product marketers around the world.

Also to be considered is the fact that designing a package often means versioning its components for a variety of retail environments such as supermarkets, Wal-Mart, drug stores, and shopping club chains. Each setting makes its own rules for what constitutes effective design. In a crowded, cavernous club store, for example, the tray in which the items are displayed is the most important visual element because it is the first thing that shoppers see.

According to Masotta, this means that “a balance between aesthetics and package communication” must be present in everything that the team creates or modifies. Frequently, a visit to the in-house store in the Englewood office helps the group to visualize the environments it is designing for. Complete with shelves and aisles, the faux mini-mart makes it easier to answer the question: “Do we understand the competitive set?” Klauser poses it another way: “Does it break through?”

For the Unilever team, a package breaks through when it makes precisely the right statement about the product it contains. Masotta says that just such a breakthrough occurred in the Hellman’s redesign, where the team succeeded in “updating the base products while adding excitement and credibility.”

He explains that the new Hellmann’s Masterbrand design reinforces the line’s unique brand personality while creating a stronger, more consistent global visual identity across a broad range of products.

“While retaining the strong Hellmann’s equities of blue and yellow, the new package design combines energetic, glowing sweeps of yellow and white with a new more modern Hellmann’s cartouche,” says Masotta. “The new logo, with its inner glow of blue and optimistic sweeps of white, expresses the vitality associated with the Hellmann’s brand worldwide. On the squeeze product line there is the heightened appetite appeal of realistic illustrations of sandwich and host food suggestions.”

Klauser thinks that the recent launch of a new line of Bertolli products also epitomizes breakthrough. In this case, the design breaks through the clutter of the frozen foods section, where the line’s six restaurant-quality premium frozen meals offer convenient dinners-for-two in vividly decorated foil pouches that showcase the Italian delicacies inside.

Learning from mistakes

For every package that succeeds, notes Klauser, there are “tons and tons of examples” of design attempts that didn’t work. But, she says, even a creative misfire can be a good thing because “you learn before it ever hits the shelf.”

The Lipton green tea package is a new design intended to extol Lipton’s tea expertise, quality, healthiness, as well as to incorporate the brand’s global logo.

Taking risks and making mistakes are “part of learning and part of being great at what you do,” says Klauser. “If you’re not finding things that don’t work, you’re not pushing the envelope hard enough.”

According to Klauser, a package designer’s most important skill is his or her ability to “unlock the insights” of the target audience. She says that Unilever’s designers accomplish this by being “out with consumers on a continuous basis,” making home visits and accompanying people on shopping trips organized by the consumer market insights department. In this way, she says, a package designer becomes a “true business partner” in the successful marketing of Unilever food products.

Masotta adds that managing a package design workflow is like air traffic control in that it obliges designers to deal with many things at once. A good designer, he says, can “transcend” the activity to be an effective visual translator of marketing and business goals. When necessary, a designer must also be able to step “five feet back” and look at design objectively, focusing exclusively on what works best for the product and its intended purchasers.

This combination of creative versatility and business discipline, says Klauser, is how “our passion for design translates into competitive advantage.”