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HBN Brand Design Wins Package Design Magazine’s Makeover Challenge

December 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

HBN Brand Design Wins Makeover Challenge

We are exposed to thousands of packaging designs every day as modern consumers.  From the wrappers on the candy by our favorite supermarket checkout stand to the hardshell plastic packaging that seems to have been designed specifically to keep the customer from getting to the product they purchased, each is a result of a packaging and brand designers use of their special powers.  Let’s step behind the scenes of an award-winning design firm, HBN Brand Design, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and take a look at how they used their powers for good to redesign the Sun & Earth product packaging, an effort that won them the Package Design Magazine’s Annual Makeover Challenge.  According to Dwight Nelson, President of HBN Brand Design,

“Our goal was to give the Sun & Earth brand a memorable image and ownable design that reflects their brand values of natural, safe, gentle and effective.

Our first step in creating a new look was to review the competition. Although some of the larger brands do a good job of creating strong brand recognition through simple messaging, we felt that most of the existing brands in the marketplace are busy, clunky and industrial looking, rather than natural and safe feeling.

After reviewing the competition and pouring over Sun & Earth’s information, we saw the opportunity to not only reflect the brand essence, but to attract a broader audience to the Sun & Earth brand through a contemporary, consumer- friendly design. We also decided to create a design that would lift the quality perception of the Sun and Earth products.”

The full case study can be found by clicking here.

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Keeping It Simple – WhiteyBoard Peel-and-Stick Whiteboards

December 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I was reading the the December/January issue of Inc. Magazine and came across an article by Issie Lapowsky that highlighted a great tool for those of us who need to draw our ideas out — peel-and-stick whiteboards.  I have never had enough whiteboard surface around to scribble on so hats off to the founders of WhiteyBoards – Saachi Cywinski, Jason Wilk, and Sherwin Kim.  Being astute at leveraging social media, the WhiteyBoards.com team had placed a Facebook “Like” button on their website which I clicked to share the delight of my find with my Facebook friends.  My friends comments in response were positive about the product but all questioned the common sense of the company name — WhiteyBoard.

So I reached out to the company and asked the question, “Would you share how you came up with the name?”  I received a response from founder Saachi Cywinski within minutes – “Our name WhiteyBoard is derived from Whiteboard, and we just added a Y. Then we thought about changing our name to AngloBoard, however we thought we may get some negative feedback if we called it that.”

So what do you think of the name WhiteyBoard? Can it pass muster in our hypersensitive politically correct world?

By the way, I ordered several of the 2′ X 3′ “Alice” versions of their product — perfect for my home office and my son’s dorm room at Caltech. Click on over to WhiteyBoard.com and order a few for yourself!

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Where are the Eco-Friendly Gift Boxes?

November 17, 2010 By 2 Comments

Gap Gift Box ImageI was cleaning out a section of my basement last weekend and came across our collection of gift boxes from nationally branded department stores like Nordstrom, Macy’s,  Gap, Talbots, and the like.  As a family, we save gift boxes and reuse them primarily for Christmas and birthday giving.  This helps to keep from contributing to the 5 million tons of wrapping ingredients that will end up in landfills this holiday season.  It got me to thinking, why don’t these Brands offer an eco-friendly version of their gift boxes and/or offer me an incentive (read – discount) to bring the box in this holiday season and let them box/wrap my newly purchased gifts into them?  In fact, the packaging could become an interesting secondary discount coupon in itself that lives on and could be used to incent friends or family receiving the gifts to return to the Brand’s store and receive a nominal discount on their next purchase.

Special thanks to the San Angelo Standard Times for the article – “Go Green With Holiday Cleanup”  for the landfill statistic and practical suggestions for reducing your holiday packaging impact.

Author Update:

Gucci Packaging

A quick update to this post with a special thank you to JoAnn Hines at packagingdiva.com for providing this bit of information.  Gucci offers eco-friendly packaging at their 284 flagship store locations.  According to the blog, upscaleswagger.com, “Gucci is taking the initiative to go green by implementing new eco-friendly packaging. The fashion brand wants to reduce dependence on materials and use 100% recyclable paper in packaging, so their revamping all packaging from the shopping bags to the gift boxes and even as little as to the tissue and ribbon that they use.”  Full post is here.

Are you interested in offering Eco-friendly holiday bags and gift boxes?  Check out the folks at Nashville Wraps.  They have a whole line of eco-friendly packaging called Green Way ®.

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What’s in a Name?

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Magnifying GlassHave you ever wondered what the origin of  your favorite Brand name is?  What was behind the naming of Starbucks, Oracle, or 3M?  There are a number of resources that can help you.  First stop, the Wikipedia “List of Company Name Etymologies” .  Many companies list that tidbit in the company history section of their website.  For example, Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.

What interesting parts of your Brand history are you leaving to other outside sources such as websites, bloggers or authors?  Does your company name have an interesting origin — leave me a comment and tell us a brief story.

By the way, Starbucks was name for the character Starbuck from a Herman Melville novel, Oracle was the code name for a consulting project Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and 3M comes from the company’s original name, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.

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Sears Goes Zombie

October 28, 2010 By 3 Comments

Sears Blue Zombie CrewMy friend Benjamin Nelson, Creative Director at Headstand Media just posted a great site review of the Sears Zombie website.  It is quite refreshing to see a mature Brand like Sears take some risk and have some fun with the zombie craze sweeping the traditional media channels.  Be sure and check out the videos on the site, they are really quite humorous.

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BrandPilgrim.com – For the Visual Thinker in All of Us

October 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

BrandPilgrim.com BlogSuma Mandagiri authors the blog, BrandPilgrim.com .  Rather than trying to describe it, here is an extract from her “About” page:

My name is Suma Mandagiri.  I live in Mumbai, India and work as an independent strategic branding consultant.

Brandpilgrim.com is a visual thinking blog that attempts to illustrate complex concepts in a simple manner.  As humans, we ideate in pictures, linkages and patterns.  It is only later that we weave our seemingly disjointed impressions into a vocal framework that is presented in neat rows as evidence of our organised thinking.  In the process, we sacrifice emotive expressions and sensorial engagement.

Brandpilgrim.com is an attempt to return us to the quirky thinking that takes the form of doodles, scribbles and caricatures on our notepads.  I believe, what we classify as ‘doodle  scrap’  are powerful repositories of knowledge and inspiration.  Beneath the quirkiness lies an organic thought process that does not need the crutch of a long-winded explanation.  And if you are like me, you respond to colours, forms and shapes with primitive glee.

With this blog, I hope to encourage you to unwrap those balls of paper that you usually reserve for your trash bin and share those precious nuggets of information with the rest of us.

Suma Mandagiri

I especially liked her Oct 17, 2010 post – Why Brands Can’t Ignore Social Media Mavens.  Click on over and check it out!  You will be glad you did.

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Nostalgia Sells

October 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Photo of people in a large Coke CrateI don’t think that it is a secret that nostalgia sells.  There are literally millions of articles on the web that highlight this fact.  Marketing experts tell us again and again that the key to sales is to make a connection to the customer. Clearly it’s easier and faster to co-opt our fond memories than create a brand new positive association with your product.  Coca-Cola  is a master at tapping into our nostalgia with many of their commercials vividly displaying their generational history. At its core, their message is “Remember way back when you were young? Well, we were there with you”.

And more importantly, they have connected the nostalgia dots on the web!  Coca-Cola.com, the consumer site, offers up numerous nostalgic items from their online store, their archives folks author both a Facebook page and Coca-Cola Conversations blog.  Going even further, the Coca-Cola Company site has an extensive section on their heritage.  Why is this important?  When you type a Coca-Cola product name into a search engine almost all of the results are focused back to key Coca-Cola websites, not Wikipedia!  They are a Brand that understands the importance of connecting the consumer to their information first.

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Chasing the Shiny Object – Levi’s

October 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Historical Levi's AdThis is the first post of an on-going series I am going to author under the headline “Chasing the Shiny Object”.  Rich, storied, iconic Brands with decades of history treat this hard-earned position with a nonchalance that is disappointing at best.  Most have abdicated the details of their history to Wikipedia.org.

On the Levi’s.com site, I had to go to the site map to even find a link to the Levi Strauss site (and the link didn’t work).  While there is some information on the Corporate site, it seems shameful that an organization that invests millions into television and online advertising, spends so little effort to connect us to the history that built their iconic brand.

Furthermore, they are missing countless ways of connecting their customers to their brand online.  Imagine a Facebook “Like” button that not only posted the current product but offered a link to the history of the product that could be shared and read by millions of brand-loyal fans.

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Green Arches at McDonald’s?

October 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Green ArchesThe October 14, 2010 article on QSR Web, ” California McDonald’s turns its Golden Arches green” highlighted the newest McDonald’s restaurant to receive the coveted LEED gold certification.  As a former employee of McDonald’s Corporation, I am proud that the company continues to focus on developing restaurants that have smaller ecological footprints.  However, replacing the iconic golden arches with  green ones is a huge Brand faux pas!  I believe there are many ways of bringing the laudable green attributes of this restaurant to light for the customer without making the proud arches look like an outtake of a Shamrock Shake commercial.


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