Looking good, selling better - product design

Nation's Business, May, 1990 by Meg Whittemore

Redesigning your firm's packages--or even its identity--could boost sales. Here are tips for getting it done.

Seven years ago, John Paino, president of Nasoya Foods, in Leominster, Mass., decided that the packaging of his tofu products needed updating. He wanted to give his health foods a fresh, new marketing identity, but he also felt he could not afford to hire a design firm at that stage of his company's growth.

"We were doing about $1 million in sales then," he says, "and I wanted to wait until we topped $4 million before I gave the go-ahead." But while he built his business, Paino also kept track of the work that a certain design firm did for clients in his area of northern Massachusetts. Paino liked what he saw from Selame Design, a firm in Newton Lower Falls, owned and operated by a husband-and-wife team, Joe and Elinor Selame.

By 1988, with consumers' interest in health foods still on the rise, Paino had reached his sales goal; he met with the Selames and decided to become one of their clients. He says he found that "there definitely was the right chemistry, which is important, since how my business was going to look to the customer was in their hands."

Paino's decision to have the look of his products redesigned reflected the reasons common to other companies taking such a step. An updated package can help reinvigorate sales when competition increases or consumers' buying trends begin to shift. "A fresh design of a product package can have a significant impact on sales," says Herbert Meyers, president of the Package Design Council, an international organization of package-design specialists.

"Redesign can mean anything from making a minor modification to a package design to creating a new design for a product that fits into the overall look of the manufacturer's existing product line," says Meyers, who also is a managing partner in the New York design firm of Gerstman + Meyers Inc.

For many firms, as for Paino's deciding whether to have packaging redesigned can depend on cost, which may vary according to the company's size, the number of its products, and the scope of its redesign goals.

"What's affordable?" says Meyers. "It's relative. Sometimes a company can't afford not to redesign its packaging if it is losing market share."

Paino embarked on what he termed a "very rewarding" relationship with Selame Design. "My instinct was they could help reposition Nasoya's products in the health-food marketplace," he says. His company manufactures tofu and tofu-based products and markets them throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada.

Since his firm is consumer-oriented, Paino explains, "I felt that our most important asset was our graphics. We needed a more upscale look that was bright and attractive and would jump off the shelf."

Selame Design decided to begin the redesign program with Nasoya's secondary product line: vegetable dressings and dips, and, particularly, cholesterol-free mayonnaise. "Originally, we called the mayonnaise product Nasoyanaise because we wanted to get our name in it," says Paino. Then Joe Selame, then firm's top designer, suggested "Nayonaise," which strikes a balance between "mayonnaise" and Paino's desire to have products reflect the company name, Nasoya. "That name shift jumped our sales by 50 percent," Paino says, "and the product no longer faded into the shelf; it really popped out at you."

Making products grab customers' attention is part of the strategy that Selame Design applies to its corporate, product, and retail identity programs. The firm uses what it calls a "family approach," which means it redesigns a company's entire image rather than just one or two of its product packages. "We develop a unique visual theme, or symbol, and use that as the focal point for individual package designs," says Elinor Selame. That way, the symbol appears over and over--on delivery trucks, on point-of-purchase items on store shelves, and on brochures, business cards, and other printed materials.

In other words, the first step in redesigning product packages is developing a corporate identity. "Every company, regardless of size, that interacts with the buying public should be concerned about how it looks," says Michael Chadick, co-founder of Chadick & Kimball, a Washington, D.C., design firm that specializes in developing multiple-use corporate-identity programs.

The term "corporate identity" can be off-putting to a smaller company, but the purpose that underlies the phrase is common to all businesses. Says Chadick: "It's simply having a clean, consistent look. . . . It's like an invisible handshake to a potential customer; it makes a statement about your product or service."

Elinor Selame agrees. "Sixty-five percent of all purchase decisions are on impulse," she says, "and that means there is a wonderful opportunity for a package to stop the customer and say, |Here I am, look at me.'" The package design is part of the overall company image and carries the corporate identity symbol, or mark.