Designer's Corner

Connecting with Your Consumers Above Today's Noise and Clutter

By Dave Studeman

Today as never before, consumers are exposed to a remarkable amount of stimuli that they must immediately process and react to. This is reflected not just in the explosion of products and services, but also in the very ways these new "consumables" are delivered—from the new media channels of the Internet, podcasts, and wireless technology to the morphing of the TV set itself. "Clutter," in all its manifestations, is the new normal.

Consumers have evolved to demand more in this new world. The question is: Have we as marketers, designers, and advertisers evolved to answer that demand?

Acknowledging the empowerment that consumers derive from all of these new choices is the first step toward establishing a meaningful relationship with them. This entails recognizing how they sort out these loud, and sometimes conflicting, messages to fit into the framework of their lives. Fortunately, today we are armed with new and powerful strategies—from emotional branding to experiential design to lifestyle targeting—that can help us actually design the resonant experiences that connect with our consumers, and form the basis of successful brands.

It's a consumer's life

Brand Engine built the Plum Organics brand to resonate with the mother who won't settle for less than a fresh, organic, and delicious eating experience for her baby.

Walter Landor once famously said: "Products are built in the factory, but brands are built in the mind." With apologies and all due respect to this acknowledged master in our field, we might append that thought to bring it up-to-date for the 21st Century: "...and successful brands are built in the heart."

Today's audiences want brands that have relevance to them; brands that connect with both their minds and their hearts and fit into the full context of their lives. This means, first, a brand that takes care of the basics so that its functional benefits are clearly communicated and understood. But then, laddering upwards, it must also tap into the consumer's emotional frequencies, allowing him to elevate the brand's functional attributes to a higher, more aspirational, or more personally relevant plane. When this happens, companies begin to build successful brands.

Take the case of Plum Organics, a baby food company that engaged Brand Engine to develop a brand that would stand out in a crowded category. Created by a mom, Plum Organics believes that healthy eating starts with the very first spoonful. Steering clear of convention and cliché, the Brand Engine team focused on the healthful beauty of the product—and, on the spoon itself, the central and constant symbol of the happy, funny, frustrating (but always lovable!) theater of feeding a baby. The result is a contemporary, fresh, and smart approach that is on the way to carving out a whole new niche in baby food.

The meanings of life

Relevance to consumers is achieved by framing the brand as part of these bigger stories in their lives. This goes further than mere "lifestyle targeting" to dig into the deeper meanings of a consumer's experience. As authors Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Darrel Rhea point out in their book Making Meaning, "Meaning is the sense we make of reality...assigning meaning to experience is how each of us creates the story of our life and its ultimate value and purpose."

The Mighty Leaf package design system evokes a rich and flavorful experience by expressing the sensory pleasure of tea.

In another case study, Brand Engine tapped into the deeper meanings that consumers place on premium teas, by redesigning the identity and packaging for Mighty Leaf Tea. The company sought to elevate the presence of its core retail brand by expressing a gourmet level of quality. This expression, as developed by the Brand Engine studio, goes to the heart of the beneficial, multi-sensory, and almost mystic powers of the beverage—a clear resonance with today's discriminating tea aficionados.

To underscore the importance that meaning has, consider the remarks of a different kind of audience expert—magician Derren Brown, one of Britain's foremost psychological thinkers. "When a group of artists comes together, the last thing they should do is talk about their art," says Brown. "They should talk about life, experience, and meaning, for this is where art begins and ends." When we, as designers, talk about meaning, we change our focus from simply making a package jump off the shelf to ensuring that it fits in with our shoppers' lives once they get it home.

This is not to say that the tea and the baby food are not important; of course they are. But instead, it is how these items align with the consumer's deeper life—not just his "life-style"—that determines their effect.

New perspectives

The Duraflame packaging was redesigned to communicate the superior performance of the reformulated product and emphasize the ambiance of a warm and inviting experience in the home.

For Duraflame, Brand Engine refreshed the decades-old identity and created new packaging that tapped into more resonant meanings that consumers have about the ambiance of a fire. Instead of the traditional emphasis on the duration of the fire, the Brand Engine team focused on the experience—the pleasure that people get from a warming fire in the hearth—and getting it without any hassles! This notion, coupled with the reality that it is primarily single women who purchase fire logs, led to a new and more attractive design that appeals not only in the store but in the log bin at home as well.

As should be obvious, shaping these resonances—cutting through the clutter of today's myriad of stimuli—is not merely a function of designing your package with a lot of white space; just as automatically putting a lifestyle image on the package is not an answer either. Instead, the bigger story should be sought because such "narratives" necessarily offer the larger context that meaning needs in order to thrive. And it is meaning that gives us the greatest chance of connecting with our consumers.

Dave Studeman is a principal of Brand Engine, a consumer branding firm in Sausalito, CA. Dave can be reached at david.studeman@brandengine.com.