Thinking Outside The Can:
A 'Condensed' Look at Package Design at Campbell Soup Company

By Patrick Henry

“I used to drink soup every day. I just paint things that I always thought were beautiful...things you use everyday and never think about.”

—Andy Warhol

The lobby of the world headquarters of Campbell Soup Company in Camden, NJ, is a bright museum of Campbell-themed artistic creations by consumers. On one wall hangs an assortment of homages to Andy Warhol (1928-1987), who, in his most renowned effort as a painter, turned the familiar red-and-white Campbell’s Tomato Soup can into an icon of modern graphic imagery.

Warhol used to say that he painted pictures of soup cans because he liked to eat soup for lunch. It’s fair to suppose that if he could survey the entire Campbell product line today, he would discover even more “M’m! M’m! Good!¨” things to whet his appetite and guide his brush. Warhol probably also would be pleased to see that Campbell’s package design group continues to take vigor, simplicity, and

emotional appeal as its creative touchstones—the same qualities that inspired him to make a masterpiece of an everyday paper label.

Package design at Campbell is a part of the company’s research and development activity—a somewhat surprising relationship, given the typical connection of corporate design groups to brand management or marketing. But, the affiliation with R&D, far from implying any dilution of the design group’s importance, elevates the team’s status and places the designers at the heart of brand creation and maintenance. William H. Lunderman, vice president, global design, says the group is regarded as a “center for excellence” in a company that depends heavily upon the look of its packaging to sell more than $7 billion worth of food products annually in 120 countries around the world.

Warhol’s celebrated observation about 15 minutes of future fame has never applied to Campbell, a classic American business institution for nearly 100 years already by the time Warhol exhibited his soup can series in 1962. Today, thanks to a portfolio of more than 20 householdname brands including Campbell’s, Pepperidge Farm, Prego, V8, Pace, Swanson, and Godiva, the company’s market profile is higher than ever. Each of these brands, according to Campbell’s 2004 annual report, is #1 or #2 in its category or segment.

Soup’s on…and on and on

“Brand maintenance” is anything that adds useful content to a label without changing its basic architecture.

What’s undisputed is that the brands generate staggering amounts of packaged products. Claiming to control 69% of the U.S. market for its cornerstone product, wet soups, Campbell sells almost three

billion cans of these mealtime favorites every year. The company says the presence of Campbell soups is so pervasive that nine out of 10 U.S. households stock an average of 11 Campbell’s soup cans in their pantries at all times.

For the package design team, this volume creates what John W. Faulkner, director, brand communications, calls an “incredibly complex” array of thousands of SKUs, each with a brand image to be upheld and, as consumer needs dictate, modified to better suit its market. It’s a formidable responsibility for a design group that, despite the world-bestriding size of Campbell, isn’t particularly large: about 30 people in Camden, and another 15 in regional design centers in several foreign countries.

Darralyn Rieth, director, global design, is one of 10 art directors in Camden whom Lunderman calls the group’s “strategic thought leaders”— the skilled translators of “consumer need states” who translate those states into package designs that balance brand equity protection with visual content that reflects changing market realities. For Rieth and her artists, this means working intuitively, methodically, and collaboratively— but above all, working a lot.

Controlling 69% of the U.S. market for wet soups, Campbell sells almost three billion cans of these mealtime favorites every year.

She says that in Campbell’s 2004 fiscal year, the workload amounted literally to one new assignment per day—a total of 365 packaging projects including new designs and updates for brand maintenance.

Launching a product like Soup at Hand®, Campbell’s convenience line of single-serve, microwaveable soups, means creating an entirely new set of package graphics. “Brand maintenance” is anything that adds useful content to an existing label without changing its basic architecture: recipes, details of promotional tie-ins, and other information for consumers. Or, it could involve tweaking graphic elements to help a package communicate more effectively, as in moving flavor banners higher up on can labels to ensure that shoppers in club stores can see the banners over the lips of cardboard trays.

No small jobs on offer here

Be it launch or tweak, every effort by the design team ultimately leads to an enormous production commitment. Lunderman points out that selling 3 billion cans of soup annually also means producing that number of labels—a volume that few package printing contractors are equipped to handle.

Bradley K. Menees, vice president, technology development, says it was possible to qualify only a handful of more than 50 label printers that he evaluated under Campbell’s strict sourcing rules. He adds that because of consolidation in the printing industry, eligible suppliers aren’t as numerous as they used to be.

Campbell’s no longer makes the mountains of cans that it fills with soup, having sold that business to Silgan Holdings in 1998. Still, introducing new containers sometimes recasts the company in a package manufacturing role. According to Ken Schwed, group manager, structural packaging design, this occurred as a part of the changeover from glass to plastic for V8 beverage bottles. Last year, in partnership Amcor PET Packaging, Campbell added a $43 million, 65,000 sq. ft. PET blow-molding facility to its beverage plant in Napoleon, OH, also home to the world’s largest Campbell soup factory. “We built the plant and Amcor installed the equipment,” says Schwed of the state-of-the-art production line, which now delivers V8 vegetable and fruit juice drinks in plastic single- and multi-serve containers. Members of the design group note that while manufacturing considerations are important, they aren’t the primary drivers of package design at Campbell. The first duty, says Lunderman, is to stay close to the

brand equities of the “classic red-and-white can” and other Campbell products because these attributes resonate so strongly with consumers. When brand equities are honored, he says, it’s easy to move the brand forward by focusing on the consumer need state and designing the package accordingly.

“Contemporary” is not the design target to aim at, says Lunderman, because what looks contemporary today inevitably turns into an anachronism with the passage of time. A better goal is to keep Campbell packages “relevant” with the right combinations of user-focused aesthetic and structural changes.

Thumb’s Up! Goodwin Helps Campbell Soup Connect with Kids at Kids’ Level

Several years ago Campbell Soup Company realized it was high time to develop a marketing strategy aimed at children, and solicited the help of Goodwin, a consultancy specializing in strategy and design for youth brands located in Media, PA. Campbell’s and Goodwin carefully integrated a strategy into the Campbell’s brand by licensing Nickelodeon characters and using cues in the “architecture” without disrupting the brand. The new soup line’s distinguishing feature was the shaped pasta in otherwise normal chicken noodle soup. “This was the first time they did a complete kids’ program,” says Bill Goodwin, president of Goodwin Design. Because it was a new strategy, Campbell’s and Goodwin performed quite an extensive amount of consumer market research when refining the Dora and Jimmy Neutron labels shown here. One element that ended up defining the line was the purple bannering arc. The arc established on these labels is now a device that is leveraged into other other products marketed to kids, like ABC Soup (formerly Alphabet Soup) and Spaghettio’s. “By featuring a key communication to kids, they’re able to introduce kids into the Campbell’s franchise and brand,” says Goodwin. Today, kids are included in purchase decisions more than ever, as parents seek to appease their little ones. “Kids pick the category, and moms pick the brand,” Goodwin explains. “In the soup area, there was very little aimed at kids.” Goodwin says his firm’s job was simply to give kids what they want and would be expecting—but were not getting at the time.

Easing means pleasing

Convenience is always a key ingredient of relevance, according to Lunderman, who adds that the group keeps a “continuous watch on the marketplace” for opportunities to make Campbell packages easier to handle and use. He says that making Campbell Soup cans securely stackable on store and home shelves is a good example of keeping a package relevant by making it more convenient. So is refitting the classic red-and-white line of condensed soups with easy-open, pull-tab tops. In the same helpful spirit, the new “iQ Maximizer” can dispenser system lets supermarket shoppers pick soup cans from gravity-fed rolling racks instead of reaching into shelf recesses for the items they want. The space-saving iQ Maximizer adds extra convenience with graphically rich display panels that make the different kinds of soup it dispenses easier for shoppers to identify, and make the categories they hold more clearly defined.

Menees says that in updating the design or the composition of a package, the end result should be change that is “exciting, but doesn’t alienate the consumer.” This was achieved for V8 juices, he says, by rethinking the shapes of the containers in the switch from glass to plastic. The containers now have contoured forms that fit not only the hands but also the lifestyles of consumers who want to be able to quaff their favorite drinks on the run. Schwed says that the tactile element also was a major consideration in designing the tapered shape of the Soup at Hand container, which is molded to fit car cup holders as well as fingers. To Rieth, a package that feels good to hold is a package that’s naturally attractive to buy. Advertising for a given product may be everywhere, she says, but the package on the shelf is the brand owner’s “one and only marketing tool that offers an ongoing dialogue with consumers each and every day.” It’s the place where the product either makes the sale-winning emotional connection with the shopper, or fails to.

Finding and pulling the triggers

Lunderman agrees that because most store purchases— especially impulse buys—are emotional behaviors, the package designer’s challenge is to “reach in and touch those emotions” with a visual presentation that can trigger anything from a general “feel-good state” to “nostalgia” for a good meal or a similar happy experience. “We try depict graphically something that will recall those memories,” Lunderman says, with evocative graphics that are “compelling to the consumer” on an emotional level. Locating the emotional touch points can never be a snap judgment, but it is a decision that Campbell’s design team has learned to make in the smallest practical amount of time. Rieth notes that the group’s job-a-day pace stems in part from the fact that the timeframe for project completion is shrinking, driven by the ever-changing, never-slowing tempo of marketplace demand.

She says that she and her artists can turn around a label design in as little as 25 days, if they have to, although that clip is “the extreme, not the norm.” The average cycle for a label project is about 20 to 28 weeks, with the exact length of time depending on whether the project involves a new package, a line extension, a minor update to an existing package, or a change arising from a “regulatory compliance need state.”

The team’s tools for this fastpaced trade include Macintosh computers, a platform choice that makes the designers the only group of non-PC users among the 1,200 people who work at Campbell’s Camden headquarters. The principal software applications are Macromedia Freehand and the Illustrator and Photoshop components of Adobe’s Creative Suite. Ashlar-Vellum’s Graphite is the preferred software for CAD; the team uses Memco Inc.’s Mia (Memco Interactive Atmosphere) for 3D imaging and rendering. When actual 3D mock-ups are needed, the group relies on its packaging vendors and outside agencies to supply the models.

Hot, hearty, and handy

All of the team’s tools and capabilities have come into play in the ongoing development of Soup at Hand. Launched in 2002, Soup at Hand was, according to Lunderman, “new from every aspect”—a portable product with a dual-purpose foam label that identifies the contents and insulates the user’s hand from the heat of the package after microwaving.

He says that as the first product of its kind, Soup at Hand ushered in “a completely new behavior for the consumer”—eating hot soup straight from the package anywhere, at any time, without a spoon—and created its own set of requirements for effective retail display.

For the designers, says Rieth, the most interesting part of the assignment was working with foam as a label substrate. Like shrink film, foam conforms to the shape of the container it surrounds when heat is applied. As the Soup at Hand label reacts to the heat of the application process, its colors intensify and its graphics contract. Rieth says the artists compensated for this in the design phase by building shrinkage space into the graphics, including the how-to-use instructions that must be printed on each package.

To rise to such challenges, says Rieth, a Campbell package designer must have “an incredible sense of design” and an equally firm grasp of the company’s marketing and business strategies. A good designer, in her view, is a “visionary” who is constantly attuned to the need state and always ready to “think outside the can” with a fresh perspective on every new assignment.

Like her colleagues, Rieth values the “electric energy” that galvanizes everyone on the design team when a project is in full creative flower. But, she says, enthusiasm must be tempered with a “strong sense of process” and the understanding that the workflow contains no “ivory towers” for inflated egos to retreat to.

“The most effective delivery of our brands to consumers is a collaborative process,” says Rieth, seeing in collaboration a strength as potent as the harmony of design in all those billions of iconic red-andwhite cans.