Brand design: express your personality

Global branding and packaging consultancy Cartils looks at the current trends in beverage label design

Building a brand in today’s consumer society has become a major challenge. Brands try to get the consumer’s attention within an information overload provided by the existence of a large number of brands. Some brands seem to succeed time after time and turn out to be role models in designing a winning brand presentation. Cartils, an international branding and packaging agency, looks into the latest developments of some of these role models within the beverage sector and explains current trends in brand design.

Femininity

After years of successful expanding, Heineken felt it had too many different bottles in its beer range. The international beer brand decided to bring uniformity in its packaging range through the introduction of a new iconic bottle. Uniting Heineken’s packaging did not only bring consistency but it delivered efficiency gaining too. It became a successful and innovative design respecting the brand’s status and reputation.

During the evolutionary update, all parts of the package design were taken into account. The designers focused on every detail. Based on Heineken’s famous racetrack around its logo, ellipses were brought into the bottle, the glass and the can providing family resemblance. But the lines surrounding the racetrack in the label opened up to integrate the bottle and the label. The clear plastic label supported this integration, creating transparency. Furthermore, the characteristic red Heineken star moved to the top of the neck label, enhancing more confidence through the brand’s icon.

While replacing the well-known long-neck, the new Heineken bottle is a couple of millimetres shorter and three percent lighter. And although the sound of this does not seem to be very revolutionary, with three and a half billion bottles a year, it turns out to deliver a saving of 14 million kilograms of glass.

Being a well-established role model in the beverage industry, Heineken set a great example with this integrated and transparent look. Another example of this integration between bottle and label is surely created by Captain Morgan’s Spiced, the rum brand owned by Diageo. It changed its name – originally called Morgan’s Spiced - and label last summer as part of a rebranding campaign featuring the familiar pirate character.  The structural packaging remained unchanged with embossed details but the Captain Morgan identity has become the heart of the brand as a very small-detailed illustration to endorse the mythological and narrative style.

Together with these two notable examples, Cartils perceives a trend of femininity through refinement and integration in many of today’s brand presentations. Great detailing tends to endorse quality. Focusing on both the label (2D) and the bottle (3D) during the redesigning process and integrating them into one united design underlines this tendency. Furthermore it fits an up-to-date version of today’s brand presentations in which brands open up and relate themselves to transparency.

Confidence and masculinity

Not long before Captain Morgan’s rebranding campaign, Diageo also changed its Smirnoff bottle into a more refined variant. In order to enhance confidence, the bottle now includes prominent signatures of Smirnoff’s historical producer Pierre Smirnoff alongside the crown. A more refined typography and glass embossing have also been adopted. Diageo even changed the brand’s main icon hoping to encapsulate the premium, heritage and purity cues. The new look of Smirnoff No.21 emphasizes the vodka’s quality and its heritage as a supplier to the Russian tsars.

Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey has also been changing its bottle for a more confident appearance. While its values remain the same, Jack Daniel’s decided to reinforce its brand changing both the vessel and label. The label retained its signature qualities but got edited to create a more crafted feel. Besides that, Jack Daniel’s got rid of its finery. The new bottle introduces more chiseled shoulders to enhance the confident and masculine silhouette.

Bringing more masculinity into a bottle or including quality cues in a label are ways to endorse a brand’s confidence. A brand can appear trustworthy and qualitative this way, representing itself as an authority in its area. Cartils considers this as a more and more upcoming trend, as it sees brands trying to get themselves noticed as masculine, broad shouldered, strong footed and contrasting labeled presentations surrounded with medals, signatures and crowns.

Authenticity

Turning back to its roots or brand story can be a whole other way to reinforce a brand. Many brands are pursuing a redesign these days enhancing the brand’s core values and roots and leaving the rest of ‘the finery’ out. The brand icon becomes the main focus in the brand presentation again. The red grouse for example – the well-known icon of The Famous Grouse – has become the main focus in the brand’s lastest redesign. Although The Famous Grouse has updated its packaging several times over its 114 year history and every bottle has featured the red grouse, it now takes a more prominent position on the bottle’s bigger label becoming the real hero of the pack.

A design should fit the brand story to become credible and authentic. By turning the red grouse into the most striking part of the bottle, The Famous Grouse centralizes its brand story in which the red grouse refers to its historical background when the noble came to Scotland – the only place where one could find the rare bird – to hunt and fish.

Also Bacardi emphasized its (sub-) brand story when launching its Bacardi Oakheart Spiced Rum. The new product is a tribute to the modern day adventurer, created in charred American white oak barrels. The textured bottle has a strong shape and looks rugged, masculine and edgy while it communicates the brand’s provenance and heritage through the badge-like label in which the brand’s icon gets a central position.

Although Plymouth Gin is creating exactly the opposite feel of the manly spirit we just talked through, its new stylish look has a common goal: heading up for authenticity. The Chivas Brothers introduced the style as part of a strategy to move Plymouth Gin upmarket alongside a global price increase. The bottle has a new rounded shape and antique style to express the unique heritage, supported with the oval label which returns to an earlier example of the packaging. Plymouth Gin’s antique feel is completed by its copper enrichment to reflect the artisanal credentials. The copper cap stands for the copper pot that has been used in production since Victorian times.

Also heading up for authenticity is the latest limited edition port collection ‘The Bold & Brave Port Co’. The collection shows five different bottles in an ingenious way, all capturing craft and expertise. As Cartils sees a trend in brands using paper labels to enhance craftsmanship, this port went one step ahead of the trend. An old-fashioned hole-punched label brings hand-crafted exclusivity to each individually numbered bottle. The rubber band and illustrated single-color seal creates quality. The bottle and the radial and flourishing layout express a classic feel with a modern touch: like a tattoo.

Grolsch

A great example in which more than one of the above trends is represented is SABMiller’s Grolsch. Together with Cartlis, Grolsch revealed its new graphic design for all bottles, cans and other packaging hitting the store shelves worldwide in the beginning of March this year. SABMiller teamed up with Cartils to give the brand a more prominent look and feel. The primary focus was on the creation of a consistent worldwide visual identity, which emphasizes the brand values as well as increasing the standout factor.  The most important solution was found in the development of the ‘Grolsch brand badge’. The new image carrier reinforces the Grolsch brand values and it provides a more fresh, robust and dynamic look. Meanwhile, it fits Grolsch’s rich heritage and shows off the brand’s story of quality, attention to detail and pride in standing out from the crowd. It embodies independency, craftsmanship, authenticity and a premium feel. But more important, it shows a brand world that revolves around beer with character.

In the new Grolsch design all of the trends mentioned before can be recognized. By emphasizing its craftsmanship (‘Vakmanschap is meesterschap’) the authentic character of the brand was reinforced. A feminine touch can be found in the refinement of the badge, while the badge as an element has a confident expression.

Today, Cartila sees three leading trends which seem to have nothing to do with each other at first sight, but appear to be connecting in a higher level. All of the above trends are actually ways to bring brands closer to their core values. Although the executions differ, brands seem to sharpen up their brand personality and dare to present themselves more outspoken in order to stand out in the crowd. In terms of design, this makes 2012 the year of expressing personalities.

About Cartils

Cartils is an international branding and packaging consultancy with offices in Amsterdam and London. Established in 1960 and one of the first branding and packaging design consultants, it advises international companies in the area of branding strategy, brand portfolio management and packaging design (graphic and 3D design) in the premium FMCG market. Today with a staff of 70 people, Cartils handles projects in more than 40 countries and has recently worked on a number of brands including Grolsch, San Pellegrino, Carling Black Label, Pago Fruit Juice, Cristalp, Wyborowa Wodka, Baltika, Chateau Giscours, Ketel One Vodka. Website: www.cartils.com.

Pictured: Jack Daniel’s decided to reinforce its brand

This article was published in L&L issue 2, 2012