Package Design - March 2013 - 23

Mighty

Messages

By Linda Casey

Color can cannonball along product benefits but care must
be taken so you don’t torpedo your brand’s shelf impact.

ne of the most powerful tools in a designer’s
wheelhouse, color owes much of its might to
its ability to speed messages about packaged products to shoppers. “It’s pretty amazing when you
think about it,” Bill Goodwin, founder of Goodwin
Design Group, opines. “When you walk into a
Walmart, Target or even a grocery store, there are
hundreds or thousands of packages and you can
zero in on three so quickly.”
Goodwin says that recall is aided by category
“norms.” These norms include where certain products are usually located in a store and the brand
colors, and consumers learn these norms at an
early age.
“By five or six, kids start to have all of the norms
all defined,” Goodwin says. “But if you put an iPad
in front of a kid who is two or three but has never
had one, they still can pick it up. So why should we
expect anything different?”

A living language
That’s because some color cues used for packaged
goods hearken back to a person’s first associations,
such as the sky and ocean. “You get quite a lot of
blue, bright green and bright yellow in household

products because they’re mostly associated with
cleanliness, the sea, the earth, the sky and all that,”
Stergios Bititsios, associate director, packaging and
design, at MMR Research Worldwide, explains.
And the use of the color of sea and sky travels
far beyond the household products aisle. Goodwin
notes that “Big Blue,” technology company IBM,
used the positive associations with the color to
brand its products and services. “IBM used consumers’ perception of the sky and ocean as things
that have always been there,” he explains. “The
thinking is that blue means permanent therefore
this brand is stable and solid. This went on to
influence our perception of what blue means in
the food aisle.”
Tom Newmaster, partner at William Fox Munroe Inc., adds, “There’s a sense of trust with blue so
it makes sense for heritage brands. It represents
security.”
Goodwin points out that blue can also help a
consumer make sense of a brand that started with
just one flavor and then expanded. Because of blue’
association with permanence and heritage, a brand
can help loyal fans find the flavor they grew up by
including blue in its packaging.
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Package Design - March 2013

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