Heart-racing days! And thank you to the whole team who have pulled out all the stops and now deserve to unscrew a few caps.
I’ve just spoken to someone who has the first 10,000 bottles of a new drink hot off the line. Now that has to be among the proudest moments achievable in this industry. After many months of planning the concept, the ingredients, packaging and marketing – the new baby is at last in your hand. Congratulations – you deserve it. And of course, they’re entering the awards.
But that’s just one step along the way to success. Today, marketing and distribution is more critical than ever before. As Steve Osborne of Osborne Pike brand design says: “A true brand story has emotional power which adds real value to the product, so that consumers end up willingly paying extra for a little bit of the brand ‘experience’. In heavily branded markets such as carbonated drinks, brands fight hard to own emotional high ground such as ‘optimism’, ‘cool’, ‘unconventional’ and ‘adventure’. Advertising plays a big role, but packaging has to deliver the desired story, too.
“In highly commoditised markets such as ambient juices, the stories told by packaging are quite functional and frankly often struggle to give consumers a reason to choose them over private label. In this case, the inherent product values are actually quite strong, including as they do natural, healthy, tasty, refreshing and sun-ripened. In this context, ‘owning’ a specific ingredient (and more specifically its story) is a powerful asset, as Ribena with blackcurrant or Ocean Spray with cranberry demonstrate.
“After ingredient-based stories, the search for added value gets a bit thin on the ground: specific blends, exotic tastes, organic and Fairtrade are all fairly generic and easy to copy. In contrast with this basic commodity sector, there’s no shortage of added value in the booming area of functional drinks, but still a challenge for packaging design because the stories are springing up all over the place and quite complex. Faced with too much choice and too much information, consumers welcome a simple and memorable story which simplifies the reason why they should be interested.
“Lucozade has been masterful at ‘owning energy’ and even segmenting this into three levels of specialisation, each new tier feeding from and back to the core. Similarly, Danone is expert at capturing simple but powerful stories on the unlikely topic of intestinal bacteria!
“Design is not advertising, of course – it relies on unspoken visual analogies and metaphors, more than showing the target group enjoying the product and looking and feeling great as a result. Listing your features and benefits is all very well, but it’s the underlying storytelling that separates the successes from also-rans.”
Our diverse selection of entries comes from every corner of the world, including countries new to the competition such as Japan, Thailand, Korea and South Africa – with the most entries in the functional, labelling and largest of all the environmental category – which has to say something about the changing industry agenda.
So now’s the time to book your seat for the biggest event held so far in the beverage industry. Tuesday 15 September is to be a gathering of the great and the good when the latest innovations in every sector are revealed on the big screen.
And if you want to be the first to get your hands on the Showcase Magazine, that’s the place to be. And you may just make some useful contacts too. Call the ticket hotline on +44 (0)1225 327850.
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