Designs of the times

How do designers and marketeers choose the cues to portray a drinks brand, and to persuade consumers to buy into it? Report by Robyn Lewis

COULD HEINZ WEINZ, from the company that is famous for nutritious, delicious baked beans, ever make a successful wine brand? Would D&G wine, from the company that is famous for skimpy designer clothes, ever do well in the wine market? Should organic co-operatives, with their raffia mafia, weirdy beardy, hippy roots, ever make a wine brand in their own image?

These are just a few of the questions posed and pondered over by the great and the good of the industry attending the drinks business event, "Style or Substance: have you got the look?"

The event, in collaboration with design company Stranger and Stranger, took place at the Imagination gallery in central London and was attended by over 100 marketing and branding professionals from the industry.

The programme began with a presentation by Kevin Shaw from Stranger and Stranger to find out if the industry really knows what the consumer wants, and to impart a few of his design secrets.

This was followed by four case studies of products that have been recently revamped, relaunched or are a brand new concept.  Kicking off the proceedings Shaw, who has designed the packaging for successful brands such as Argento, Valdivieso and the brave new lenticular Lo Tengo label, of which more later, began by looking at supermarket wine labels.

"Supermarket wine shelves are fairly straightforward.  Whichever department you’re in there are about half a dozen variations of olive oil, vinegars whatever, and then you get to the wine aisle and there’s 30 or 40 Merlots," he said.

 "It must be really tough for people wanting to go and just buy a bottle of Merlot to try and wade through all the different categories of countries and work out which one they’re going to pick up. And it’s getting really tough as designers try to find ways of attracting them. I’m always trying to work out the cues that the consumer is looking for.

Those secrets that will get the bottle picked up and bought. We’ve got a few things to play around with – bottle shape, label size and shape, logo and fonts, – but I question the idea of brand values as far as wine is concerned as I’m not sure it really applies."

To make his point Kevin showed the audience some footage of consumer research that he had conducted comparing the recognition of a brand like Heinz Baked Beans with the wine market leader, Jacob’s Creek, "Australia’s top drop".

Unsurprisingly, even when the Heinz trademark greeny blue colour and black shield was moved from a tin can to a wine bottle it was recognised by all those questioned and associated with wholesome, home ideals – "frankly, values we would all murder for," said Shaw.

No one, however, seemed overly keen on actually buying a Chilean "Heinz Weinz", and the doctored Jacob’s Creek bottle, now called John’s River, did not do so well either. Consumers had only about 30% recognition and thought it was "a bit plain" and "quite boring", with only one person recognising it as looking remarkably like a Jacob’s Creek bottle.

In an audience vote only half the audience said they would have chosen it as a design if they were building a new brand.  The next wine up for the consumer test was the concept Dolce e Gabbana bottle created by Kevin.

The audience of marketing and branding professionals was almost unanimous in their vote that this would be a winner on the shelf. 

However, they were proved completely wrong and the consumer research demonstrated that, while people were impressed by the packaging, they were reluctant to buy what they feared would be a style over substance, low quality, high priced wine.

The concept organic wine, "Espiritu"‚ did go down well, however, with consumers very open to the idea of an organic wine, which they saw as a brand that was ethical and trustworthy. 

The consumers were then shown a real wine, the Berkmann Wine Cellar’s Argentinian Lo Tengo, with the new lenticular label (producing a sort of 3D, hologram effect) designed by Stranger and Stranger.

Generally the video footage showed that people were very interested in this bottle and agreed that they would buy it. "I find this really interesting," said Kevin.  "You hear people talking about values and authenticity and wanting to keep it real and not wanting gimmicks, yet they buy into something like this.

It just shows you how fickle the consumer is and how you’ve got to get the balance right. With this label – which is essentially a gimmick taken from the front of a cornflake box – we had to treat it in a very classical way with old fashioned photography and type," he explained.

Finally, Shaw tried out a mystery wine. Consumers were shown a bottle and label design that he had put together in conjunction with a room full of consumers (pictured near left).

It went down very well with the research group in the video who said it looked fruity and appealing.  "That word ‘fruity’ comes up time and time again with consumers," said Shaw. "It’s what people want to have associated with red wine.  If you can get the label to look fruity, you’re onto a good thing." 

The next part of the presentation involved not consumers, but the actual event audience on the day.   With the brief of designing the packaging for a new French Rhône and using a system of "Ready Steady Cook" style coloured cards, the audience voted for their preferred bottle shape, name, font, colours and label shape, and within a short time they had come up with a design (pictured far left).

It was, in fact, surprisingly similar to the consumer design – classic colours, floral/fruity illustration and rounded label. And as Shaw pointed out at the close of the event, he wouldn’t be overly surprised if it appeared at a supermarket near you soon.

If you can get the label to look fruity, you’re onto a good thing

"Absolutely. Though I think we’d try and not do something that can only be printed in the US," said Bewes.  "The response has been very positive across the board.  We are finding that consumers are buying for the label the first time but are purchasing a second time because of the wine itself, which is good.

There have been some anti-gimmick comments certainly within the wine press but the Argentinean 2002 vintage was especially good in terms of both quality and quantity so we sent the wine out to be tasted without the label and it got some great reviews across the press."

The audience were curious to know if the brand was being aimed at the on-trade.  "We thought they wouldn’t be interested at all but some of the restaurant groups and more so the pubs and clubs think it is great," said Bewes.

"There has been some restaurant interest too but I don’t think you are going to see it on the tables of Le Gavroche."  Another question raised was would the label stand up to handling? "Well, we’ve not done any specific research on this but the label is made of very hard plastic – you need to have a feel really. It doesn’t wear easily and you can even peel it off and stick it to your fridge," Bewes answered.

Sales of the wine since the launch have been good (though no figures as yet) but there is still work to be done.  As the audience were told.  "Merchandising is vital to success and it is pretty well essential that we try and get Lo Tengo off the bottom shelf and out of the corner, where Argentina is unfortunately stuck in Sainsbury’s.

We worked with a buyer from Sainsbury’s at a very early stage in development but there is only a certain amount of influence that a buyer has with his merchandising colleagues.  But where it has moved it has been remarkably successful.

We’ve also put a "recommended by" tag on it and it has been Sainsbury’s wine of the month. The next step will be the first price promotion, which is happening soon.  We hope that Lo Tengo has opened a few eyes to the potential of radical design and of Argentinean branded wines," Bewes concluded.

2. Wolf Blass – Beringer Blass

For the second case study there was a very different story to tell concerning a re-brand rather than a brand new product.

"We felt that Wolf Blass was a sleeping giant and wanted to take it to the next stage and make it into a real power brand,"  said Chris Thompson, marketing manager at Wolf Blass.

 "With this in mind we did a consumer research study in the UK and in Ireland, where the Wolf Blass brand is very strong. 

We found that consumers were looking at the Australian category and seeing it as dominated by big brands and large companies but they felt okay about this because they saw it as reliable in terms of consistency of the product and also good value.

The problem for Wolf Blass was that the consumers in these research groups did not see the wine as Australian and were confused by the packaging. Was it traditional? Contemporary? Cheap? Expensive?  We also found that the packaging did not conform to any of the cues that consumers expected from Australia, which they saw as contemporary and innovative," explained Thompson.

"What came out of the research groups was a very low brand awareness of Wolf Blass  outside of a loyal customer base and we felt the packaging was part of the reason for that.  The old-style bottle and label was garish, tasteless, masculine and looked as if it were German, or possibly American, with the big eagle.

When we looked at other big Australian brands, such as Jacob’s Creek and Rosemount, we found that one of the cues that the consumer had come to expect from Australian wines was very minimal labelling.

I mean, the label on the Wolf Blass covered a huge amount of the bottle and such old, static labels were out.  "The new packaging was much cleaner, simpler and more minimalist in design, which meant high quality to the consumer," Thompson continued.   "The new label fitted in with the Australian wine cues that customers expected and we kept the bright colours, especially the yellow, which already had great shelf presence."

The result of the relaunch is an impressive set of figures.  In conjunction with increased distribution and marketing and PR investment, Wolf Blass has grown by 40% in the UK market over 12 months. It has just jumped into the top 20 brands by value and has continued to grow in Ireland.

 "So, all in all a bit of a success," as Thompson put it.  The biggest challenge of the re-vamp, it seems, was making sure the new packaging wouldn’t alienate the core of loyal customers that Wolf Blass enjoys while ensuring it did attract new drinkers.

 "This was the key to the whole project really," said Thompson. "We had a consumer advertising campaign to coincide with the launch and that was featuring the yellow label, which was the cult wine. We did in-store activity promoting the new gift boxes over the Christmas holidays so people saw the new packs.

We also held in-store tastings as well – so lots of interactive mechanics to try and drive awareness of the new pack. People said they didn’t realise how tired the old label looked until they saw the new one. That’s when you know it was the right time to change."

3. Tio Pepe – González Byass

Sherry – now there’s an interesting proposition for our audience of respected wine marketing and branding gurus.  How to transform what is often perceived as Grandma’s Christmas tipple into a trendy bestseller? To answer this question our third case study considered the Tio Pepe Sherry brand, presented by international marketing manager for González Byass, Paul Kerstens.

"The re-branding of Tio Pepe is very interesting because it was such a drastic step," said Kerstens. "Despite the activity and expense that was invested in the brand, sales were not good and the future didn’t look very positive for Tio Pepe in the UK. As a result we had a bit of a ‘now or never’ feeling."

The Tio Pepe team were up against the popular image of Sherry as a heavy, sweet drink from the back of the store cupboard.  The challenge for Tio Pepe was to create an image that had exactly the opposite connotations – fresh, light and dry.

It was not an easy proposition. "We decided to do a huge market investigation to find out what people wanted," said Kerstens. "We found that our old packaging was confusing to the consumers as it was in Spanish, it was in a very basic bottle, it was inaccessible and we knew the communication through the labelling needed to be much clearer.

"We also found that people thought that we looked cheaper, more downmarket than our competition – Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Croft Original. The overall presumption was that we were a downmarket rather than premium product and very Spanish.

Now, there seems to be two images for Spain – the cheap Costa Brava Spain on the one hand and the Joaquin Cortes, Barcelona and tapas, on the other, which is a very positive Spain and we wanted to align Tio Pepe with that part," said Kerstens.

The team set about creating a new look that would align the brand with white wine.  They maintained the white letters on a black background, which had strong consumer recognition; changed to green glass; both the front and back labels were rewritten in English; it was explained where Tio Pepe comes from; the fact it is dry, and the grape variety was mentioned which was a first in fino, or indeed Sherry history.

The audience was curious to know about the effect of changing the glass colour on the product and wanted some details about the new English label.  "In the history of Sherry it was thought that any colour other than black would affect the product but we are sure that this is not true," said Kerstens.

"We’ve done some tests and there is no effect, but also we try and stress that this is not a product that can be kept for many years," he explained.  And the end result? "The consumer reaction was that it was perceived as much more sophisticated and expensive, more of a brand, more of a wine; that it was very, very premium and that it stood out from our competitors.

We followed up the new look with PR and marketing campaigns to make people understand how to drink Tio Pepe properly and that’s something that’s an ongoing process."

Case Studies

Following Kevin Shaw’s presentation the event consisted of four very different, but equally illustrative and interesting case studies.  Here’s a snapshot of each of them.

1. Lo Tengo – Berkmann Wine Cellars "With Lo Tengo, what we wanted from the packaging was a way of grabbing the consumer’s attention without spending a fortune on either discounting or advertising," said Andrew Bewes, sales and marketing director at Berkmann Wine Cellars, in his presentation to the assembled audience.

The project was a collaboration between Berkmann, Bodegas Norton, Stranger and Stranger and Cellar World International.  It was conceived to try to reverse the trend of Argentinian wines losing sales and market share and to try to combat the trend of heavy price promotions.

"We wanted it to be innovative but we also wanted to retain the Argentinian integrity and inject that passion," said Bewes.  "It was Kevin [Shaw] at Stranger and Stranger who first mentioned the idea of a lenticular label to us. It must have been him who mentioned it first since no one else knew what it meant." (Incidentally, according to the dictionary it means, "Shaped like a lens, or lentil‚?!).

There is no doubt that without the devaluation of the peso and the willingness of Bodegas Norton to play around a bit, the project would never have even got off the ground, said Bewes.  Then, even when it did, there were huge technical problems, which Bewes said he could bore the audience to death with ("There’s nothing I don’t know about lenticular lenses now.").

The main problem seemed to be that, because of the way the label works, if anything is re-sized, for example the bottle size, the whole image has to be recalculated.

Then there was the time when one of the only two printers who could produce the label went into liquidation; the problem of finding an adhesive that would attach the label to the bottle; and then the discovery that the resulting label is 10 times more expensive than a normal label. So, the audience asked, would they do it all over again?

4. Sailor Jerry – William Grant and Sons

The final case study was a new branded product from whisky specialists William Grant and Sons, though it wasn’t whisky but rum. Elwin Gladstone, brand development manager at William Grant and Sons, gave the presentation.

"The Sailor Jerry rum was conceived to be an iconic lifestyle brand with relevance to a younger 22 to 35 year old market, which is a very difficult market to get into," he began. "One of the most important things was that the product had a big personality and that it offered strong functional benefits.

One of the problems with spirits like vodka is that vodka is vodka. It tastes the same no matter how much money you throw at it, so we identified that we wanted to create a spirit with a taste or texture benefit to differentiate it from the big boys like Smirnoff and Gordon’s," said Gladstone.

The brand that William Grant and Sons came up with was Sailor Jerry, a blend of Caribbean rum, vanilla, lime and spices.  It was felt that it was important to create a strong personality for the brand and that the best place to get that was from a real person.

The story goes that, while working with a creative agency in the US, the branding team discovered a famous tattooist called Jerry Collins, or as he was known to all, "Sailor Jerry". While digging through his belongings, apparently, they found an old recipe for a spiced rum and so bought the rights to all his tattoos and the recipe from his family.

"We then gave the brief to a design company, which was very open: what would a spirit based on a person called Sailor Jerry look like?" said Gladstone. "After we had chosen the design from the concepts shown to us we did some research in bars with young drinkers.

One of the things we are doing more and more at Grant’s is not to do research in formal, enclosed research galleries but in real situations like bars.  We found that they either loved it or hated it, which we were very happy with, but we did find that people wanted more heritage on the bottle, to make it more real and so we had to tweak the design.

In fact we added a foot label with all the heritage values."  One of the more interesting aspects of the new product is that the decision was taken by Gladstone and the team to not call the spirit "rum".

This was because in the UK rum is seen as either Bacardi, which is essentially a vodka to the consumer or dark rum which is seen to be an old man’s drink, according to Gladstone.

As a result it is marketed as, "His original Spirit", which is intended to be positioned in a similar way to Southern Comfort.  It isn’t necessarily seen as a rum or a liqueur, it’s Sailor Jerry.

At the moment the product is currently available only in selected bars in Brighton, but the company hopes to role it out further.  "The response to the product in its first five weeks has been really good," Gladstone told the audience.

"We are beating sales targets in outlets by a considerable margin and have found people are already bar-calling for it. Our benchmark is Jack Daniels which sells over 10m cases worldwide and we would aim to eventually hit 20% of that.  The next step will be to roll out nationwide and we have targeted four or five other cities to concentrate on next," he explained.

One of the points made that particularly interested the audience was concerned with the mechanics of rolling out a start-up brand.

"With this target audience you have to be very careful as they are very cynical and so we need to rely heavily on word-of-mouth,"

Gladstone said. "One of our original ideas was to advertise the product on prostitutes’ calling cards and place them in phone boxes but we weren’t allowed to do that, so we’ve had to try other routes.

In Brighton we appointed a brand manager who knows everyone and that has proved successful and we have also been allowed to paint a huge mural in Fat Boy Slim’s nightclub, Concorde 2.

"A traditional marketeer might say that this hasn’t been particularly well branded but what we’ve tried to do is keep an air of mystery about it and that has worked very well to get people talking about it and trying to guess what it is.

The UK on-trade is a very crowded place, and both patience and standout is required.  Hopefully we have both with Sailor Jerry."