Stay Tuned/21 September 1997

We had some network problems this week, and thus there was no Sunday article last time around. The clippings have been piling up. However, I'm saving some of them against the inevitable dry spell that will come within the next two weeks.

Can you identify this object?

It's the gold seal that comes between the red and white sections of a Campbell's Soup can. Did you know that people frequently can't remember which color is on top? (It's red.) And the gold details of the trim, including the seal, are almost invisible - they never stay in the brain. Nonetheless you know what a Campbell's soup can looks like. It's one of the most recognizable label designs in America.

Did you ever stop to think about what a plain, even boring, design it was? Until very recently, they didn't even show the product, and the most prominent thing on the label was (and still is) not the description of what the can held, but the name of the company.

Yet, when the packaging was designed, somewhere shortly after the turn of the century, it was innovative marketing for this reason: previously, few manufacturers (one notable exception was Mennen toiletries) distinguished between a brand and a product. Manufacturers would make several different products with completely different names, logotypes, and graphics, and nothing obvious to indicate that the products all came from the same company.

This was poor marketing for the manufacturer, but also poor for the consumer, who could otherwise have used the brand indication as a barometer of product quality. Campbell's was one of the first to take the gamble - betting that their name would become more important, and that with their name prominently established, the quality of the soup inside would eventually be taken for granted. Needless to say, this ploy worked.

I got this tidbit and others from a book called The Total Package by Thomas Hine. This book is somewhere between a history of packaging and an analysis of consumer habits. It's fascinating. Packaging, in many cases, not only completely changed existing marketing and sales techniques, but also made the supermarket possible, and made many products possible as well which literally could not exist without the proper packaging.

Pancake mix, for example. Bottled salad dressing. In each case these are ingredients you could mix fairly easily yourself - the packaging created the product, not the other way round. Aunt Jemima pancake mix may be the oldest of these fabricated products still being sold today. If flour, baking powder, etc were still being dispensed wholly from bins and barrels (into containers brought by the customer, yet - how ecological!), this product would never have existed.

In addition to pointing out the good points of packaging (and there are many - if you don't believe me, think how much more sanitary the business of selling groceries has become since 1800), the book also covers the low ground, and not just the obvious problems like packaging waste. The growth of packaging in this country also spurred the growth of a class of people who do nothing but design packaging ... and a culture of relentless consumption.

Of course, if it wasn't for the wretched excesses of consumerism, this column wouldn't be here. Case in point: Campbell's Soup. Their Cream of Mushroom soup can now prominently features a box, in a contrasting color, with a picture of some fresh mushrooms and the statement

Made With FRESH Mushrooms

Er ... I already assumed they were fresh when they went into the pot ... and they're sure as heck not fresh by the time I open the can.

But that's packaging for you.

Since the book above is strictly about packaging, it doesn't comment upon changes in the way products are marketed over the years, although I have have another book - Advertising the American Dream - which does. It's a textbook, and fairly tedious at times, so I'm not recommending you read it. (Besides, I can't remember the author offhand.)

I think the trends fascinate me more than the actual ads do.

For example, in the fifties and sixties, ads were often calculated to give one a sense of belonging, that the product would instantly bring acceptance into some June Cleaver-ish or vaguely Pepsi-generation peer group.

It is a comparatively recent trend ("Calgon, take me away!") to show a product as allowing you to reclaim a measure of solitude - of allowing you to get away from all the noise and clutter of this impersonal modern world - never making the observation, of course, that a great deal of that noise and clutter is caused by advertising.

The latest entry in this category is a line of hair care products called Willow Lake. The ad features a woman swimming, photographed as if completely underwater, with interesting typography which says:

Slow down.
Entering
Willow Lake

Population: One.
You.

This is about the most blatant example of the "buy me solitude" approach that I've seen yet.

There is also the trend which Bill Griffith describes as "marketing to 15-year-olds." Griffith (the brain behind the Zippy comic strip, in case you don't know) is usually cranky, and I think he may have the age bar a little low, but what I refer to as "skateboard marketing" definitely exists. For example, the current conventional wisdom is that kids like fun food, and they like portable food. And that adolescents love cheese. This is why "string cheese," a bizarre extruded concoction loosely based on some configurations of genuine mozzarella, but without the interesting parts, is now everywhere you look.

Here's an especially nasty new contender.

This is fake mozzarella and fake cheddar, extruded and then twisted together into a two-colored strand - or perhaps it's extruded as is, it's hard to tell. The oddest part about this vile brand is the horrible name ("Polly-O") you've never heard of, and the low-rent looking packaging. Yet this is, in fact, a product from Kraft. Maybe they didn't want to admit to it?

I wonder sometimes if I could just do a regular column on breakfast cereals. The packaging book notes dryly that breakfast cereals are a product which is particularly dependent upon packaging. That's an understatement. I think that with some breakfast cereals, the package is the product. I mean, how many variations on simple grain preparations are there, really?

Today's hot cereal news (well, actually it's cold cereal news) is that Wheaties, one of the last bastions of non-sugar-laden cereal aimed at the kidlets, has caved in. I have an ad here for, yes, "Honey Frosted Wheaties" - "honey frosted" being a euphemism, in this case, for a coating of sugar so thick that it can easily be seen in a three-by-three photograph of the product. Sigh. First Cheerios and now this. Wonder what all those "champions" would think.

Unrelated cereal issues: Can we formally make it a crime to use the word "Tradition" on any new product? Post has been introducing a line called "Morning Traditions" - and, while some of the cereals in the line are decent, you can't call something a tradition until it actually becomes one.

In fact, you can't call yourself a "tradition" at all. I think that's a label you have to wait for someone else to give you. You can't claim it for yourself. Of course, I suspect that the hubris of this doesn't aggravate other people as much as it does me.

This is a cheap shot and I apologize, but as long as I'm on my rant, I should point out that the word "aromatherapy" - and the whole idea that there could even be such a thing - bothers me. No, not annoys. Bothers, as in, I take it as a serious indication that something is wrong with everyone's brain.

I figure that anyone who'd believe in aromatherapy would believe in pyramid power and UFO sightings. And Norelco obviously knows the target audience. Look at those designs.

OK, in all fairness, the UFO on the right isn't a smell machine. It's a sound machine - it generates soothing noises so you can relax or sleep better. I actually believe in those; I've used one to fight insomnia on a few occasions.

I believe in life on other planets, too, for what it's worth, but I think that the chances of them actually contacting us are very slim indeed. And I believe that "aromatherapy" is just a fancy name for looking at the world through rose-scented glasses.

I shouldn't step on my punchline like this, but I really must point out that "Fred the Baker" from Dunkin' Donuts, in case you haven't heard, is retiring. I think this is really a very clever way to deal with the situation, actually. This is a big deal here in the Boston area, where Dunkin' Donuts originated (and can be found on nearly every block). So raise your hats to Fred ... and go into the Dunkin' Donuts today (Monday, 22 September) - they'll give you free coffee and a donut in honor of the occasion.

My correspondent who had previously berated me for picking on "naturopathic" remedies immediately fired back on the aromatherapy topic. I will concede that nice smells are relaxing, and that inhaling some kinds of vapors could even be conceded to have a therapeutic effect, if we push the definition a bit. However, I dislike the word, and I dislike the way it's being marketed, where everything which has a pleasant smell is suddenly said to have "aromatherapy" value. That's hype, plain and simple.

The weird brand name Polly-O, which I took to be a contrivance, turned out to be a company with an actual heritage that had been around quite a while before Kraft got to it; the surname of its founding family was Pollio. Apparently Kraft chooses to spin products into that brand line if it wants to give them that Italian cachet - which still does not explain how those thoroughly suburban-American extruded plastic cheese strands ended up there.

Although, as noted at the top, there was no column on 14 September, it's not obvious from the contents page - because I dropped "Selling Female" into that space after the fact.

and now back to our program

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