Packaging Design Example: Beer
Somewhere I remember reading about training restaurant employees to suggest beers in the same way they now do for wine. You know certain wines go with certain foods, but what about beer? The information exists, but only within a select community of beer lovers.
Solving this problem for restaurants presents a business opportunity for a brewery wanting to target a niche in the customer’s mind. Moreover it’s something information design could help with.
Icons reduce
brand smog
The solution was to put various icons indicating use directly onto the otherwise unassuming label. In this case, a triangle indicates this beer goes with pizza. Research would go into actually creating the best beer for each type of food. And in designing a product which makes for a significant contribution to the restaurant business, from both the context of service and increasing sales margins.
The tagline “The Beer For Food” provides product positioning.
Although you’ll notice labeling is nondescript, this serves several purposes. One is not to distract from the icon–based approach. Once established in restaurants, users might like the concept enough to establish a position on crowded store shelves, which calls for testing the packaging the bottles fit into to add some shelf appeal.
Can Product Packaging Be An Information Technology?!
The idea itself is far from new in product packaging, which use application charts. Deciding on the beer which will bring out the flavor in food is just such an application.
Ink and toner cartridge displays still offer a confusing array of data to sort through to find the one which fits your model. Wherever the competition is focused on the product itself, opportunities abound for the competitor who focuses on the context in which the product is used.
An information technology is one which cuts through data (or brand) smog to aid decisionmaking. With hundreds of image–conscious brands offering a thousand confusing options, this use–centered package design offers context.
Resources
- What I read about selecting the right beer for food suggested the problem. The Emergence of the Systemic Brand by Ray Podder seemed to suggest a solution. Systemic branding can make use of several of the ideas you find here, not the least of which are context and system thinking.
- Is Your Brand a Nuisance? suggests customers are rebelling against a central marketing tenet: more choice. The author believes marketing success is going to be based on relieving the customer stress of too many decisions. Instead of adding to the cognitive friction, this design example cuts through the brand jungle to simplify the decisionmaking process.