Containers for Kids
Marketers of foodstuffs have to be clever. Food and beverage products compete on overcrowded shelves for stomachs that can only accommodate so much. In order to get noticed in this competitive environment, product designers brilliantly manipulate the first-impression power of packaging to cast their products in a new light or to overhaul them completely. We've put together some packaging concepts directed at young people that, if not exactly ingenious, have a bluntness of purpose we anticipate (or fear) will be contagious.
First MUU, a Swedish dairy offering whose packaging and TV ads have won awards and praise at home and in the U.S. MUU is just flavored milk, but its playful dancing cow motif and "fun size" drink box transform the parent-mandated beverage into a barnyard-meets-Candyland experience. In a world of super-abundant beverage choices, especially for kids, MUU has executed a major coup in making milk something kids clamor for.
American companies, too, are changing the old codes of conventional beverage offerings. Juice concentrate, a mainstay of the value-driven beverage market, is annoying. Frosty, wet cardboard cans, difficult to remove string seals, obstinately slow thawing contents. Ocean Spray seized on consumers' dissatisfaction by remaking the product and the package. Ocean Spray Liquid Concentrate comes in an aluminum can, opens like pop and resides outside of the freezer. Its saturated color and lively typography make it as tempting for kids as adults, and it's easier for kids to make themselves. It's one of those no-brainer improvements that makes consumers wonder why it wasn't always that way.
General Mills' new sub-brand of Yoplait, Go-Gurt, takes a product formerly distasteful to all but the most health-conscious kids and reinvents it through packaging. Sold in garish packs of 24 portable tubes, Go-Gurt is a small helping of yogurt that does not require a spoon. Whether no spoon means consumers will be cleaner or messier is unclear, but both perceptions are selling points, depending on who¹s buying. It's still yogurt, mind you, but the company has divorced any mention of fruit or health from the product. Instead, the varieties are color coated, as in, "The red kind rules, but not as much as the blue kind," (from an online product review). Give a kid a tub of sweetened cultured cream, and he'll make gag sounds; put it in a squeezable tube, it "rules."
Like the makers of Ocean Spray and Go-Gurt, candy companies understand the power of eye-popping color to make products stand out, but the fluorescence war seems to have escalated significantly in recent years. Lifesavers and Starburst, small candies that once only came in tubes of about 15 situated next to the gum, have been upsized into plastic sacks and emblazoned with retina-searing inks which allow them to stand out on shelves amid an already loud lot. Lifesavers' GummiSavers product, for example, has three components of surface activity: a base of pink, fuchsia and bright purple undulating stripes, a layer of dancing cartoon fruit and a layer of names and messages, some lettered in silver, others ("FUN!," "INTENSE FLAVOR!") reverberating with Day-Glo yellow explosions. Just try distracting your kids from the candy aisle.
On a final note, a non-cosmetic wrinkle in packaging. Summer 2000 saw Coca-Cola making about 1,000 specially constructed cans of its product which were packed inside normal 12 packs. A hidden compartment is revealed when the top is pulled off the modified cans, revealing a winning game token. The prize cans are indistinguishable from regular cans before they are opened. Obviously, few people will ever get to see a "false top" can, so Coke was hoping just the idea of novel product construction (and the prizes, of course) will ignite people's imagination and thirst. This promotion has the unintended effect of making consumers feel disappointment when they open the can and actually find the company's product there. Some packaging ideas, it seems, can be too clever for their own good.