Letting the Package Be the Hero: The Fuel That Makes Brand Engine Run

by Patrick Henry

Almost everyone in creative for packaging seems to talk about designing outside the box, and there's nothing wrong with that. But why doesn't someone turn the notion inside out by designing with the box instead? Brand Engine, a Sausalito, CA, brand strategy and design agency, found a clever way to do it for Nancy's Specialty Foods, a maker of prepared appetizers for home entertaining.

To help the client increase packaging's impact in club stores, the shop crafted what it calls a "billboard effect" into selected Nancy's packages for that environment. For a box, say, of dessert tarts on a tray, Brand Engine's designers divide a wide shot of the product between the package's front and back panels so that when two boxes are displayed side by side with one facing the opposite way, the halves rejoin, and the graphics are perceived as a unit.

Presented in this way, the boxes create a visual impression like that of a well-printed spread ad in a magazine, with the image precisely split and the crossovers neatly aligned. Best of all, the implied holism of the two packages often prompts consumers to buy both of them even though they are wholly separate items. Brand Engine says that big-box retailer Costco loves the concept and wants to see it applied to other products.

Originality that lets the package be the hero is the creative keynote at Brand Engine, a 20-person firm under the direction of principals Will Burke, Eric Read, and Dave Studeman. It's also what the readers of Package Design thought the agency did better than anyone else as they voted Brand Engine the winner of the publication's 2005 Makeover Challenge.

Versatility and eclecticism in high gear

In operation for eight years, Brand Engine services business-to-business and business-to-consumer accounts with all forms of branding support including strategy, naming, corporate identity, Web/print development, and of course, package design. Read describes the staff of brand strategists, designers, and production specialists as a "versatile and eclectic team" that can deliver spot services or entire campaigns to the shop's equally eclectic list of clients.

According to Burke, the agency's principals have worked on 200 major branding programs for over 100 Fortune 500 companies and counts many well-known brands such as Sara Lee, Foster's, and Otis Spunkmeyer in its design portfolio. Studeman adds that Brand Engine has become particularly adept at "transforming technology brands into consumer brands" for clients like HP, Logitech, Palm, and the WiMax Forum.

Burke notes that as HP's strategic agency for packaging for the last three years, Brand Engine has been that client's partner in branding technology products for the many regional variations of the global consumer market. "Anytime somebody touches a box containing an HP consumer product, they're touching our work," Burke says.

The strategy for HP is the same as for any brand owner that turns to the agency for fresh ideas. "We help our clients build successful brands that connect with their audiences," says Burke, "and we build a set of brand tools that let us align brand perceptions with brand expectations." When everything works, the result is the "emotional, magnetic, and intuitive" connection between brand and audience that makes a package irresistible.

Epitomizing the approach is the agency's branding makeover for Nancy's, which has been purveying frozen quiches, appetizers, desserts, and other handcrafted food products to various retail outlets since 1977. The client, says Burke, didn't want to change the basic brand identity, but it did wish to improve and extend the sense of "connectedness" between the brand and its growing audience.

Parties in packages to go

Brand Engine's solution was to embrace home entertaining as the new marketing keynote for Nancy's by identifying its products as "Party Essentials" for easy do-it-yourself catering at home. The essence of the strategy was to promote Nancy's as "your home catering consultant," an image reinforced by including tips and tricks for entertaining on the packages and at every other touch point between consumer and brand.

Brand Engine repositioned Nancy's as an essential for year-round home entertaining by elevating the perception of product quality, and identifying ways to create a stronger connection between the brand and its audience.

Read says that another step in the evolution of the Nancy's brand—recently acquired by Heinz—was repositioning the company as a year-round provider of party essentials. For years, Read explains, the company did the bulk of its selling in the festive stretch from October to December. Brand Engine helped Nancy's to move its appeal beyond this seasonal time frame by showing the client how to promote its products as essential to entertaining for any occasion, at any point on the calendar.

Read points out that the match of brand perception to brand expectation isn't always a given, as would be true of a high-end product in a package that doesn't quite do its contents justice. He says that with this in mind, Brand Engine conducted a multi-brand campaign to help Mighty Leaf Tea, a maker of "artisan teas," to penetrate retail markets and "five-star" resortsworthy of these elegant infusions.

The design firm's first project for Mighty Leaf was to create a new brand name and a new brand identity for a selection of ultra-premium teas to be sold exclusively at "five-star" resorts and spas. Brand Engine monogrammed the new line "ML" and gave it a stylish packaging system featuring "library box" tea samplers and other structures. The design mixed European and Asian sensibilities that were also steeped in the ambiance of the posh settings where the products would be offered.

That success prompted the client to rethink the packaging for about 40 SKUs under the main Mighty Leaf Tea brand. Brand Engine designed graphically rich packages that evoked the sensory pleasures of consuming the product—an effect that the teas' original Kraft boxes, with their nondescript stick-on labels, never conveyed. The result: more shelf space in Whole Foods, Nordstrom's Café, and other tony retail outlets where the teas were not well-represented prior to the redesign.

For Topsiders and Reeboks, too

"Pure" was the marketing mantra for Simply Organic, an organic food producer seeking to demonstrate that its products could appeal to a wider audience than just Birkenstock wearers in health food stores. In a tight-turnaround project that required the creation of 100 different retail packages in about 10 months, Brand Engine proposed a scalable packaging system with entirely new package graphics that communicated "healthy" and "affordable"—as well as "tasty"—to consumers in mainstream shopping outlets.

Experts in the natural foods industry, Brand Engine built the Simply Organic brand from the ground up, implementing over 100 SKUs in 10 months.

According to Burke, the agency's quest for a look of reassuring simplicity befitting the brand name inspired the creation of a "classic square French jar that harkens back to the past" for Simply Organic spices and flavor extracts. Proof that the desired "emotional, magnetic, and intuitive" connection was made is the fact that the glass bottles have become collectibles—people keep them for other uses after the product is used up.

Burke says that mapping a strategy for Hillside Candy's Golightly brand of sugarless candies in the Package Design Makeover Challenge gave the agency a similar opportunity "to think about who that audience really is."

This yielded the insight that making the right connection would be about more than just satisfying the need for a sugar-free product formulation. Golightly's diet-smart customers want that, but they equally crave the temptation of "something indulgent"—the emotional hook that anchors the agency's winning redesign of the package structure and graphics.

Brand Engine sometimes teams with outside partners like Solid Design of Emeryville, CA, for structural design—a discipline that Studeman says is enjoying a "renaissance" after a period when cost pressures caused many product marketers to de-emphasize innovation in package structure. The configuration of a package is critical, contends Burke, because it is the "point of entry" into the connection with the consumer. Depending upon what structure is chosen, he says: "You can look like a commodity or you can look likea leader."

Evolving or dissolving?

Looking like a leader means keeping an eye not only on the progress of the brand, but upon the continuing development of its intended audience. Part of what drives audience evolution today, says Studeman, is the fact that online and digital media have created many more sources of information about brands than there used to be.

"We ask our clients, 'Your audience has evolved—have you?'" Studeman adds that because consumers nowadays split their shopping across many different retail environments, the branding agency also must ask: "What part of that experience am I taking to the next store, and how do I modify the package to fit it?"

As technology becomes more personal, brands need to connect with specific audiences. Graphics must quickly tell the consumer that this is the product for them.

According to Read, answering the question has demanded a shift in thinking on the part of product marketers who once thought only in terms of the "aisle" and what it would take to make the package "jump from the shelf." Today, he says, it's just as important to know what it will take to ensure that the product fits in with shoppers' lifestyles once they get it home. The profusion of product choices facing consumers intensifies the challenge of cutting through the clutter and hitting home in that emotional, magnetic, and intuitive way.

Burke says that the brands we remember from 20 years ago—and still resonate with consumers—are the ones that have succeeded in making the connection and keeping it strong. To endow the brands of its latter-day accounts with the same enduring appeal, notes Studeman, Brand Engine will work just as hard at understanding clients' business goals as it does at creatively expressing their brand identities. "It's no longer just a matter of having a meeting and developing the brief," says Studeman.