"Products That Look Different" Are Winning Shoppers Over. What Are the Designers Behind Them Thinking?

Solving a problem is what counts. So how do packaging designers find the problem — and how do they solve it?

Think about it: when you stand in front of a crowded shelf picking something out, what are you actually going on? The packaging's looks?

Packaging does far more than catch your eye. Apart from natural products that hardly need any, you cannot use a thing without dealing with the package it comes in. Picking it up, putting it down, opening it, closing it again — we handle all kinds of packaging every day.

For a designer, how a package comes into being has its own secrets. Good packaging is never just pretty, fashionable or cool. It has to meet what the shopper needs and carry what the brand believes.

Over the past week, designers and senior executives from Chinese and foreign packaging firms gathered in Shanghai to talk about their craft at the 2017 FBIF Food & Beverage Innovation Forum.

You may not know their names, but their work is all over convenience stores, supermarkets and shopping sites, and you have almost certainly handled some of it. BETC, the French firm that designs Evian's bottles. LPK, the American firm that first put potato chips in a tube — Pringles. JKR, the British firm behind the stripped-down Domino's packaging that appeared last year. And L3 Branding, a young Chinese firm that made the cartons for Mengniu's Hi! Milk 《嗨！Milk》.

QDaily sat down with them at the forum to ask what makes a design good, how design language and working methods are shifting, and what they make of the consumer market. From their talks and our interviews, we have pulled out a few ideas worth keeping. They offer a glimpse of what the people behind good design are actually thinking about.

Back to essentials: packaging is getting simpler

Minimalism in packaging stopped being news a long time ago. You can see it in the Pentawards winners every year — they are either playful, elegant or plain.

But minimal packaging is hard to pull off. Its force comes from boiling a brand down to its essence and finding the simplest way for a shopper to interact with it, which makes it a real test of a designer.

To Christophe Pradere, art director and founder of BETC, the French firm behind Evian's design, water is an interesting product: colorless, tasteless, and still sold at a high price.

"Evian's brand and packaging are saying that what's inside is water. When you grab the bottle, you are holding water — the essence of nature." Food is heading the same way, he said: "stressing its own taste and recipe, stressing what the thing you are buying really is."

In March last year, Evian mixed mineral water with fruit and plants for the first time, launching its Fruits & Plants flavored water and hiring BETC to design it. The bottle was shaped like a drop of water, tinted with the bright colors of the juice inside, with simple fruit motifs on the body to signal the flavor — motifs that read as three mountain peaks, an easy echo of Evian's old logo.

The design brought in new elements while keeping Evian's sense of purity, and one look at the package tells you what is being sold. Pradere's "essence" is on full display.

"Making things with less material and better resources is the trend right now," Peng Chong, art director at Pinzan Design, told QDaily.

In 2014 he won the Pentawards platinum prize in the food category for his design for the organic rice sold under the name Qian's Gift 《黔之礼赞》. The work shut out every industrial element: the paper was made by hand by families in Guizhou, and the printing dyes came from plants.

Simpler packaging and lighter environmental impact stand out most sharply in one peculiar setting — China's baijiu trade. Peng Chong's earlier Pentawards winner, the sauce-aroma baijiu packaging he designed for Qian's Gift in 2013, was read as a sign of how much the industry was changing. The old approach — elaborate packaging that could eat up 60% of a product's cost, all to make the liquor look expensive — was on its way out, and stripping it back had become the new idea.

The shoppers changed, the clients changed, the whole market changed

"Change is the only constant. From now on it's a world of living editions — packaging will keep changing, just like fashion."

That is Chen Peiqi, a partner at the British firm JKR, speaking to QDaily. She pointed to Japan, where competition is brutal and the packaging of many ordinary products is refreshed every three months, and said brands everywhere are turning out limited editions to keep up with a market that moves faster each year. The emoji edition of Mengniu's Chunzhen yogurt, which went on sale late last year, strikes her as a good example.

"They — the clients — are fixated on young consumers now. What they ask for used to be grand and cosmopolitan. Now it's cheeky, cute and fun."

JKR had a good year in 2016: its 140th-anniversary limited edition for Budweiser and its Domino's pizza delivery box each took a Pentawards prize. Both hint at how quietly JKR's own design language has been shifting.

For the Domino's box, the team threw out the clutter on the old packaging and kept only the brand's two-color mark, blue and red, set against bold white dots. What makes the brand itself distinctive was pushed to the front, and shoppers remember it.

Budweiser's new packaging brought in the flat logo style now in fashion — the largest change since the first version appeared in 1936 — which helps the brand hold up across the many screens and platforms it will have to live on. A limited-edition run timed to the US election also got people talking for a while.

LPK, the American firm that grew up alongside P&G and has more than thirty years in packaging, sees the same thing: clients trying everything to win over young people, and asking that the packaging pull in millennials too.

"When a big global brand wants to come into China, it doesn't really know what the Chinese market wants," Benton N. Sauer, LPK's vice president for Asia, told QDaily. "Millennials," he added, is too broad a word. Cultures differ, and millennials in one region cannot stand in for millennials in another.

LPK designed the tube that Pringles come in, and handles packaging for household and personal care brands including Pampers, Whisper and Olay, with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. It is now putting more of its effort into the research that happens before any design begins. The Guangzhou office handles research on the Chinese market, and colleagues in the US call over now and then to ask: "Hey, what are Chinese people into these days?"

As LPK sees it, young shoppers in emerging markets like China are readier to try something new. For a global brand, that makes their tastes both faster-moving and harder to read.

Other shifts in China are changing how LPK works as well.

One recent job was packaging designed only for e-commerce, for a household and personal care brand that wanted shoppers to find something fresh both in stores and online. More and more brands now save their more unusual designs for the web, where a shopper spots them easily and decides to buy fast.

As sales channels and attention move, so does the designer's route to a solution. The more shopping happens online, the more packaging leans on fashion and entertainment, and the faster a designer has to think: the package now has far less time to catch anyone's eye.

Jiaguwen, a firm that works only on drinks, teamed up with the online liquor retailer Jiuxian.com to make Shengjing Shanhe, a huangjiu sold exclusively on Jiuxian for Hunan Shengjing Dry Huangjiu. It used a wooden gift box and a glaze-sprayed glass bottle, an unfamiliar shape meant to shake up what people assume huangjiu looks like.

In a market that turns over faster and faster, how do you find your place in it and work out what shoppers actually want? NEOM, an Italian design firm founded in 2009, has a method of its own.

"You can test it on the shelf. Put the product on a shelf, walk away, and from ten meters off see whether you can find it. Then come closer — five meters, three meters. It's the simplest test there is. Five minutes and you know whether a package has a problem," said Artem Movsesyan, a partner at NEOM.

A design that stirs no feeling, Movsesyan believes, will not draw anyone in. He puts weight on the emotional value a package adds, and on market research as a way of reaching the needs shoppers have not put into words.

"The answer we get is A, but what we have to make is A-plus. You have to see further than your own research to come first in this market."

Back in 2011, a new infant formula brand asked NEOM to build it from scratch. NEOM gave it the name MAMO, plain enough for people in Russia, Asia or the Middle East to take in. For the packaging, the firm wanted to show the warmth and pleasure between a mother and her baby, so it drew a cartoon character for MAMO and wrote stories around it, then made three different packages for three age groups — lively and cute, aimed at babies and mothers at once.

"The truth is, we do a lot of market research, and the results keep coming back nothing like what we expected. They floor us." Li Guanru, founder of L3 Branding, thinks shoppers come in many layers and cannot be swept up in a phrase like "young consumers."

Li founded his firm four years ago and won work from Mengniu and Tencent by pitching against rivals, over and over. Hi! Milk, his design for Mengniu, later took a 2016 Pentawards gold, a 2016 iF Design Award and the best dairy packaging prize at the 2016 Global Dairy Innovation Awards, and made his name in the trade.

For a brand like Mengniu, Li says, the real market is in third- and fourth-tier cities. So the packaging has to land on the spot that is just right — not too arty, not too dull — a notch above the middle of popular taste, and no further.

Hi! Milk is that middle made visible. The little cow fits the faceted Tetra Prisma carton exactly: pull up the folded corner and you have the cow's ear, and the expression changes from box to box. The cow lifted the milk out of a crowded dairy case at a glance — vivid, and easy to get.

"So when we talk about creativity and design, what we're really talking about is the business logic underneath — where the problem is, and how to solve it," Li Guanru told QDaily.

Cover image from: Pixabay