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EPISODE 368 51 mins

How to Ready Your DTC Package Design to Sell in Physical Retail Spaces



About the guests

Fred Hart

Kunle Campbell

Fred is a Partner and Creative Director at Interact, a world-class branding and packaging design firm that specializes in consumer product goods. Their clients include FitVine, Boulder Canyon Chips, Fat Snax, and Monster Energy. With over 20+ years in the creative space, Fred has become the go-to expert on helping brands differentiate themselves on shelves. Whether your listeners are interested in taking a consumer product idea and launching it, or revamping their existing products, Fred would love to join the show.



On today’s episode, Kunle is joined by Fred Hart, Partner and Creative Director of Interact Brands, a branding agency scaling challenger brands up from digital into retail environments.

Fred got into design at a very young age after sketching shoe designs and sending them to Adidas. While young, turning down Adidas, this opportunity missed led him to a bigger one and building his own branding agency. Growing up in a place of a cultural melting pot, Fred developed his design philosophies by being exposed to different people.

Interact Brands is breaking through conformity through their designs, and more than that, their regard for their partners as well as their consumers. They highly value research and have dedicated teams researching consumers’ wants and needs. As Fred stated, “What isn’t seen isn’t sold.”

In this episode, Kunle and Fred talk about designing and branding. You will get to hear about Fred’s design philosophies that led their partner brands to increase in revenue as well as being sustainable. This is a great episode for business owners and marketers of CPG brands trying to go into retail.

Here is a summary of some of the most important points made:

  • “The consumer journey in a physical format starts 10 to 15 feet back. As soon as I start to walk up, I’m already trying to navigate.
  • “We focus on design effectiveness as a studio and that separates us from other agencies because we’re not pursuing creative design awards. We’re pursuing awards that validate creative being a tool for business.”
  • Understanding consumers can help determine the design of brands that can, in turn, form a positive relationship between the brand and the consumer.
  • Understanding your audience is key and critical. The reality is that the bigger and more successful you get, the more general your audience becomes.
  • Design is one of the fastest ways to kill a brand. If you have a great design and a subpar product, it will accelerate the death of your brand.

Covered Topics:

On today’s interview, Kunle and Fred discuss:

  • Fred and His History with Design
  • Design Concepts that Pave the Way to Success
  • Testing the Packaging Design
  • Owning Your Form of Brand Equity
  • Design Effectiveness
  • Optimizing Design in Audience Targeting
  • Packaging Sustainability Trends
  • DTC to CPG Designs
  • Critical Concepts in Packaging for Retailers
  • Interact’s Research Process for Targeting Customers
  • Challenger Brands’ Key Pillars to Success
  • Top Food and Beverage Events

Timestamps:

  • 06:07 – Fred and His History with Design
    • Growing up in Hawaii, a melting pot of culture and race made him empathetic with people.
    • Fred developed the listen-and-learn first approach which he also uses in their agency.
    • Being a basketball fan, he would cut out shoes for his favorite player and put them in composition notebooks and then sketch.
    • Fred went to art school in Chicago and finished his undergraduate in graphic design at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.
  • 10:34 – Designs Concepts that Pave the Way to Success
    • “Entrepreneurs are people that are incredibly brave and this challenging spirit that they bring to the table is something that we want to continue to harbor in the element of creative, brand building, and packaging.”
    • BOOMCHICKAPOP, one of the fastest and largest popcorn consumer brands used color palettes to convey flavor, personality, and attitude instead of using photography for their packaging.
  • 15:58 – Testing the Packaging Design
    • “CPG brands spend a lot of time trying to get their packaging, communication, and branding spot on for launch.”
    • “DTC method is highly iterative with tons of testing.”
    • “More emphasis on understanding the key design or key consumer for retail or Omni Channel brands.”
  • 18:13 – Owning Your Form of Brand Equity
    • “The principle that works is that ‘People don’t read, they recognize,’ particularly in the world of food and beverage.”
    • “What we try to instill in our clients is owning some form of brand equity.”
    • In the instance of Dr. Squatch, the Sasquatch character was recognizable and told us we shouldn’t touch it. That keeps agencies like ours from having personal creative agendas and always honoring the consumer first.”
  • 23:07 – Design Effectiveness
    • Interact focuses on design effectiveness as a studio because they’re not pursuing creative design awards but awards that validate creative being a tool for business.
    • Interact rebranded a company called Boulder Canyon that saw a 54% increase in sales every year which equated to $13 million in revenue.
    • Interact won a grand prize from Designalytics, a company that awards design effectiveness in the U.S.
    • Interact did a redesign for a company called GoodPop that saw a 40% increase in sales because of the packaging redesign.
  • 24:57 – Optimizing Design in Audience Targeting
    • Getting into Whole Foods is the Holy Grail for retailers.
    • Interact helped in rebranding Nestle’s Hot Pockets, a $1 billion company whose core eating audience are 13-year-old gamers.
    • Hot Packs should cater to both the 13-year-old and the grocer (a mom, dad, grandparent, etc.)
  • 32:39 – Packaging Sustainability Trends
    • Valerie Hawks, Interact’s Head of Sustainability and Production, helps their clients understand how to take great creative work and actualize it when it comes to printing.
    • She also helps clients with “what they can do to enact more sustainable practices in their business.”
    • Consumers are becoming watchdogs in terms of greenwashing.
    • Interact wants to build authenticity when it comes to sustainability.
  • 35:00 – DTC to CPG Designs
    • “CPG, in the world of retail or brick-and-mortar, the packaging design’s function is to sell to a consumer. When it comes to DTC, you’ve already made the purchasing decision based on the website, images, and social media presence.”
    • Physical packaging of the box and experience of it showing up in the mail post-rationalize the sale.
    • “Smaller companies go out of their way to make handwritten notes and put them in the package.”
  • 39:21 – Critical Concepts in Packaging for Retail
    • An example of it is the Club that focuses on the “what” of the product. It is not a brand-building place but a place to move products. Consumers want to know what the product is about so the packaging needs to be more education-oriented.
    • If it’s a variety pack it should be clear and easy to understand that there are three flavors.
    • You need to think about how the products palletize or the design pattern.
  • 42:17 – Interact’s Research Process for Targeting Customers
    • Interact has a dedicated strategy team that is central to the research needs and desires of their clients.
    • Interact has two offices which are located in Boulder, Colorado, and Austin, Texas.
    • Interact does their primary research but they also do qualitative and quantitative studies and validation testing with their partners.
    • Interact works with lots of challenger-stage brands.
  • 44:35 – Challenger Brands’ Key Pillars to Success
    • “We say ‘no’ to a lot of client opportunities if we try their product and we don’t think it’s where it needs to be because design is one of the fastest ways to kill a brand.”
    • One should have a phenomenal product and then build a phenomenal design on top of it.
  • 48:14 – Top Food and Beverage Events
    • ExpoWest happens every March in Anaheim. It has over 80,000 attendees a year and over 5,000 brands.’
    • The Fancy Food Show in New York every summer that’s more on specialty foods.
    • Sweets and Snacks happen every year in Chicago, mostly focused on the confectionery industry.

Takeaways:

  • “The consumer journey, in a physical format, starts 10 to 15 feet back. As soon as I start to walk up, I’m already trying to navigate.”
  • “In the early days of a brand, it is important to be hyper-focused on your audience.”
  • Product should be phenomenal first and then build a phenomenal design on top of it.

Links & Resources:

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Transcript

On this episode, you’re going to learn how to ready your direct-to-consumer package design to sell in physical retail spaces. It’s a great episode you don’t want to miss it.

Welcome welcome to the 2X eCommerce Podcast show. This is the podcast dedicated to rapid growth in online retail. On this episode, I interviewed Fred Hart, he is the Partner and Creative Director at a branding agency called Interact. He dialed in to share his experience and advice to online retailers or direct digital native brands, CPG brands specifically, looking to scale up from digital into retail environments. There’s a specific playbook he shares, a specific way you approach physical spaces, and a specific way to stand out on retail aisles, and we brush every single piece of detail in that playbook.

This is a great episode. We are in a recession. Omni-channel brands have more of an advantage than single-channel brands. I’m seeing a lot of activity going Omni-channel from direct-to-consumer brands to scale and hit their potential. This is an episode if you’re running a CPG brand and you’re trying to figure out how to stand out on a retail aisle. This one, you don’t want to miss. Enjoy.

Fred, it’s an absolute pleasure having you on the 2X eCommerce Podcast.

It’s pleasure to be here. Mom, if you’re listening, I love you.

On the spotlight. Could you please give a one-minute introduction of who Fred Hart is?

Fred Hart is a donut connoisseur, he’s a lover of sneakers and basketball, and more than anything, he is a change maker in the CPG industry. I run a branding and design firm called Interact that works with CPG companies to help participate in the changing of the guards and building new companies that resonate with today’s modern consumers.

Quite uniquely, you’re bringing DTC brands Omni-channel to retail environments through branding and packaging and standing out.

We have a long history of working with brands and retail. Because of that, we have this outsized institutional knowledge to help DTC companies that are continuing to look to grow. Eventually, they need to become Omni-channel brands. We take a lot of our retail expertise and help them prepare to finally compete with other brands for the first time in a physical retail location via grocery, mass, club, or whatever you can think of. Oftentimes, the work that we do to prep them to better compete in these physical realms ends up benefiting their digital experiences as well.

I’d like to dig deep into it. I want to go back to your formative years. As a child, as a teenager, and as a grown-up, is there any design history? You mentioned the fact that you like basketball. Tell me a little bit about your early days and its connection to design if any.

I’m blessed to have been born and raised in Hawaii, particularly on the islands of Maui and Oahu. That gave me a real curiosity about the world. Growing up on an island, you get to know everyone around you but also realize there’s a lot happening outside of it. That innate desire to continue to learn has given me a listen-and-learn-first approach that’s benefited our agency and our clients and has been a part of our success along with the phenomenal people we employ.

Growing up in Hawaii, I was a minority. The majority of the population is some form of Asian-American or Polynesian mix. It’s a real cultural melting pot. Maybe I was empathetic to different people, different cultures, and different drivers for people. That serves me well in the realm of design where we are not building for ourselves. We’re not artists. We have a commercial element where we are using designs on behalf of businesses to help them thrive. Usually, that means connecting better with consumers, which drives revenue. There are those pieces.

I got into design through my love of basketball. I used to collect sneakers. As a young kid, I used to cut out all the shoes from my favorite players and put them in my composition notebooks and sketch. When I was 13 years old, I was sending shoe designs to Adidas and they replied with an NDA that they wanted me to sign. I thought they were going to steal everything that I made from that point forward so I stopped sending them anything, which was a bad decision.

It led me on my path of being interested in arts and creativity. I eventually went to art school in Chicago and then finished my undergraduate at the University of Arizona in Tucson studying graphic design. I stumbled my way into packaging design through some design agencies and that’s where I learned a love of brand building and a passion for the CPG world.

It’s interesting, this pathway through to where you are now. On your website, Interact stands out with the brand you’re working with. You seem to be working now with DTC digital native brands and CPG brands looking to dominate in retail spaces. Should we get into the first principle concepts on package design for CPG brands? What should founders and operators be focusing on in this episode? What should they be aware of when it comes to making CPG packaging that will put them not necessarily guarantee success but put them on that pathway to success in the retail environment?

What we want to do is find something that all of our categories take for granted and use it to our advantage. Click to Tweet

What we’ve learned working with a lot of entrepreneurs is that these are people that are incredibly brave and willing to put things on the line. These are not people that have 9:00 to 5:00 jobs. This is a livelihood. The amount of bravery and the challenging spirit that they bring to the table is something that we want to continue to harbor in the element of creative, brand building, and packaging.

We like to repeat this quote that the opposite of bravery isn’t cowardice, it’s conformity. When you’re talking about CPG, particularly in the world of food and beverage, if you walk through a grocery store today, there is a lot of design that all looks and feels the same. There’s almost like this formula of a big logo, big food photography, and getting 4 or 5 claims onto the packaging.

If you’re a natural product, let’s use white, green, or brown. It’s this rinse, wash, and repeat that happens. What we like to do is tell our clients that we want to challenge the category, not the consumer. It is easy today to simply be different for different’s sake or to try to stand out amongst a crowd. What we want to do is find something that all of our categories take for granted and use to our advantage.

I’ll give you an example so that some of the audience reading understands. BOOMCHICKAPOP, one of the fastest growing and largest popcorn consumer brands out there today, when it first launched, they didn’t have any popcorn on the packaging. If we’re being honest with ourselves, who doesn’t know what popcorn looks like? Secondarily, whose popcorn looks different from another brand? No one. It’s all the same. Why are we wasting precious real estate to depict the thing that’s inside the bag and that everyone already knows what it looks like and looks no different from everyone else?

BOOMCHICKAPOP, what do they do? They forego the use of photography, which gives them back precious real estate. They lead with a brand-forward personality-driven name in BOOMCHICKAPOP where everything else is Popcorn Indiana, Orville Redenbacher, and all this stodgy stuff. They use a color palette to convey flavor, personality, and attitude. It’s a lot of those smart ways that they said, “Here are ways we can challenge our category.” They don’t alienate the consumer. The consumer doesn’t need to see popcorn. It has been a part of their success. That’s one of the key principles that we work with. I’ll give you a second if you have a follow-up question.

I’m looking at BOOMCHICKAPOP, I view it more like a canvas. If I was to deconstruct it, it’s more the typography, the name. BOOMCHICKAPOP stands out. They’ve used typography to bring it out. Every other thing is with a color palette and is educational. They boxed up the content with words, clarity, and a few icons. It’s almost minimalist but, at the same time, it will stand out in an aisle.

When you think about retail, there’s a saying, “What isn’t seen, isn’t sold.” The consumer journey in a physical format starts 10 to 15 feet back. I’m walking down an aisle or I want to go grab a beverage from the refrigerated section or something like that. Soon as I start to walk up, I’m already trying to navigate. “Where’s my coffee? Where are my ice teas? Where are coconut waters?” There are important design codes built into a lot of these brands or these spaces that consumers use to navigate as they inch their way closer.

In the instance of you calling out how different BOOMCHICKAPOP looks and how much it stands out, a lot of that is purposeful too because they need that visual hook and anchor from a distance to then attract consumers as they get closer so that they can make a decision, “This looks interesting. This looks exciting. I want to try this,” versus what they previously had been buying. If the product is great, you create this positive feedback loop. Now, they suddenly have a new shopping ritual by buying your brand.

How nimble is testing? With online, you could run an A/B split test at a snap of a finger. You need to know what to test, you put it online, and it’s done. With packaging and retail environments, do brands have the privilege to test your packaging or is it one shot?

The majority of CPG brands spend a lot of time trying to get their packaging, their communication, and their branding spot on for launch or within the retail space. It is different than the DTC method, which is highly iterative and tons of testing. What we like to say is we want to test to learn but not test to win. We can’t let the data tell us what to do and take our hands off the steering wheel. We need a little bit of vision. Particularly, we are trying to go out and challenge some categories.

Oftentimes, some of this feedback we get from consumers is backward facing around what works today but not what will work tomorrow. Outside of things like digital printing and being able to run different locks at retail, what we find is more emphasis on understanding the key design target or key consumer for retail or Omni channel brands and solidifying the three most important or salient points to utilize.

You’ll always learn things from being in the market, there’s no substitute for that. You have to remember that, unlike DTC, you can’t geo-target someone. You can’t run a funnel the way that they can. You’re almost speaking to a Gen pop. That changes if I’m talking about Walmart versus Whole Foods, it’s two different consumers. You can see there’s almost a level of universality that has to be accounted for in terms of who’s going to be looking at your brand. It’s a good thing not to be for everyone. You have to be confident in the messaging that you craft as a result.

What was the second branch you were going to speak to before I called shot and after the BOOMCHICKAPOP example?

It wasn’t going to be a second brand. Another principle that Interact works with is that people don’t read, they recognize. This is key, particularly when we think about the world of food and beverage as most brands have some large wordmark. Even when we look at BOOMCHICKAPOP, it’s primarily typographic in nature. They have other recognizable things like their starkness and design or their color palettes.

What we try to instill in our clients is owning some form of brand equity. That can be a logo if you think about Nike, Starbucks, McDonald’s, or Apple. It can be a color if your Coke, Tiffany, Cheez-It, or Oreo. If you’re Banza Pasta, orange. It can be a pattern. You see a lot of patterns in the fashion world, we’re talking about Louie Vuitton, Burberry, and Gucci.

It can be a structure. Method, the hand soap cleaning company, has that beautiful pearl drop bottle. Califia oat milk has a beautiful craft. Of course, as we all know in the spirits world, having a distinctive packaging structure usually helps. Think about the Absolut bottle, Hendrick’s gin bottle, or some of these other things. Sometimes it is typography that is the more recognizable component.

When we’re creating packaging, it’s not just about packaging but it’s building the brand in hand. A lot of those components that we’re creating need to be extrapolated into the brand world, website, digital, and all these other components. Once you think about how many places your brand will be, you have to ask yourself, “How will I go out and create recognition across all these touchpoints?”

Will it be the color that anchors everything? Will it be a logo that anchors everything? Will it be a pattern that anchors everything? Will be an illustration style? Think about the Red Bull Gives You Wings commercial. You can air those today. They’ve been doing it for over a decade. That light featherweight pencil drawing has become a part of their equity. That’s something that we drill into our clients as a key principle.

When we’re working on rebrands of companies, and we can talk about Dr. Squatch, a successful DTC brand, we filter through what we want to change and what we don’t want to change through this lens of, “What do consumers recognize today?” Some brands don’t have anything that’s recognizable. In the instance of Dr. Squatch, the Sasquatch character was recognizable and told us we shouldn’t touch it. That keeps agencies like ours from having personal creative agendas and always honoring the consumer first.

It sounds to me brands either new brands will build distinctive visual assets that are portable across multiple platforms or channels and more established brands would have accrued an asset that must be honored because it’s recognizable. If you look at the BOOMCHIKAPOP brand, it comes with Angie’s logo there. It doesn’t go away, it’s always there, and it’s intentional. I’m not American so I don’t know much about Angie’s but it seems like that collateral was not going to be taken away with their packaging.

It’s a holdover. The BOOMCHICKAPOP brand is referenced as such and therefore Angie’s could be moved to the back panel or removed altogether because they’re almost creating two brands there. Angie is the founder. Angie started the brand. BOOMCHICKAPOP started as a pseudo tagline if you will. Now people refer to it as the brand today. If they were to come to us and we were to do some work, we’d say, “What do people recognize? The BOOMCHICKAPOP name. If they don’t recognize Angie’s as much, let’s remove that, or let’s do something strategic with it to give back some more real estate for some other considerations.

We want to test to learn but not test to win. Click to Tweet

You’re taking us through your philosophy. You talked about what isn’t seen, isn’t sold. People don’t read, they recognize. Is there any other key guiding philosophy that dictates your design work?

We focus on design effectiveness as a studio and that separates us from other agencies because we’re not pursuing creative design awards. We’re pursuing awards that validate creative being a tool for business. We rebranded a company called Boulder Canyon and they saw a 54% increase in sales every year, which equated to $13 million in revenue for that company.

We won a grand prize from Designalytics, a company that awards design effectiveness here in the States. We did a redesign for a company called GoodPop. Before and after, they compare those things in the market with actual retailer data and sales data. They concluded that because of the packaging redesign, they saw a 40% increase in sales.

For us, we’re always thinking about, “How can we create a stronger connection with the consumers? What do consumers care about first?” If we understand that, then we can craft additional design assets on the behalf of brands that forge that positive relationship between them selling great products and consumers rewarding them because they can find them or the experience is more enjoyable or there’s an emotional quality that they can get behind.

Brands that are built intentionally have a target persona, a psychographic, and a demographic target. How important is it to optimize for that target regardless of the fact that it may be in a different environment from that target at some point in its lifecycle? As an example, we do have whole foods in the UK. We have a few in the London area. The nearest to Whole Foods experience is like Waitrose, for instance, in the UK. If you’re targeting Waitrose, it’s more middle-class markets and up. Eventually, some brands find themselves in more mass markets and supermarket brands such as Sainsbury’s or Tesco. How do you intentionally design for a target and still survive in other retail environments?

In the early days of a brand, it is important to be hyper-focused on your audience. There’s usually a point where a company, for instance, might want to expand the natural channel or natural retailers and go into more conventional. This happens all the time in the States. They’ll get into Whole Foods, it’s their Holy Grail. They get into global Whole Foods all over the country and then they’re like, “Target called and now Target wants us.” That’s usually a signal to a brand to look at themselves and say, “Are we ready for an even bigger and wider audience? Do we need to go through some refresh or redesign to update our communication and our hierarchy and some of these other pieces?”

I’ll speak to some of our work with Hot Pockets. We rebranded Nestle’s Hot Pocket brand, a $1 billion company. What was interesting about that was the brief that we received was all centered around helping the Hot Pockets brand speak to its core eating audience, which are 13-year-old gamers. Previously, the brand has been spoken mostly to the buyer and the buyer is the head of the household. Most 13-year-olds aren’t doing their own grocery shopping. You have the head of the household, a mom, a dad, a grandparent, etc, that’s usually the one that goes out and buys these things but they don’t consume them.

Hot Pockets want to make more of an impact in their social media outreach. They are investing in online gaming. They have an eSports team that they’ve sponsored. They’re doing live streaming on Twitch. They know that for cultural relevancy, they do need to tap into their true audience. We were brought in to help refresh the brand and make it more lively, energetic, and fresher to connect with that eating audience.

At the same time, we couldn’t alienate the buying audience. They have two different interests. A 13-year-old wants personality and flavor and cares about some of the more fun elements. The head of the household cares about the price point and satiety. “Does this thing have protein in it? Will it hold over my kid between lunch and dinner?”

Sometimes with brands, you’re forced to hold two of these different needs at the same time and then figure out, “What do both audiences want?” Appetite appeal and food photography usually need to speak to both audiences. The back of the pack, maybe that’s more for the kid. The thing that you put the Hot Pockets into is called the susceptor, maybe that’s more for the kid and less for the adult so that can be younger, more edgy, more hip, etc.

To get back to the original question, understanding your audience is key and critical. The reality is the bigger and more successful you get, usually the more general your audience becomes. You hit so many different types of people and that’s where doing consumer research is helpful, to understand, “What are the three most important things generally to this entire group? How do we focus our communication around that?”

I particularly like the Hot Pockets packaging, they’re a typography comic-style, load it, heat it, and enjoy it. There are some icons on there that would catch my attention as a visual person. There’s an internal one that looks almost like an infographic comic strip thing, which holds the actual product. There’s the internal packaging and the external packaging. Do you want to speak about sustainability? If you’re speaking to consumers who care about sustainability, what approach would you take in packaging? What trends are you seeing?

We’re fortunate to have an amazing person on our staff, her name is Valerie Hawks, and she’s our Head of Sustainability and Production. She is the one that helps all of our clients understand how to take the great creative work that we do and actualize it when it comes to printing in the physical world. Also, what they can do to enact more sustainable practices into their businesses be it on the printing or manufacturing side or looking at their company beliefs and how we can weave that into the positioning work that we do for some of these companies.

Sustainability is not for everyone. There’s nothing worse than greenwashing. In fact, that usually gets you in a lot more trouble. We have honest conversations with some of our clients to understand how committed are they and how much we want to signal that to consumers. We’re in an era where people on social media are talking about Taylor Swift, the Kardashians, private jets, and how much carbon emissions they’re creating by these convenient flights. You have consumers who are becoming watchdogs more and more every day. That means you have to build with authenticity more than ever, which is a bit of a buzzword now.

We do spend time getting to know our companies. If sustainability isn’t their jam, what we’ll at least do is figure out, when it comes to the packaging, how can we be more helpful to the consumer so that they can be smart or educated about the recyclability of something. Will it go into the waste stream? Are there different inks that we can be using that might save them money and so on and so forth? There’s a lot I can speak to and go into but it’s also a big and broad subject.

The thesis of this conversation has been moving the DTC-CPG brand from a digital to an Omni channel environment. Stepping back into the DTC world as a CPG brand, the unboxing experience is important and the feelings it evokes. Sometimes people feel special and they look forward to receiving the cadence of receiving products and that in itself is a habit-forming pattern. Do you want to give us a brief overview of what some CPG brands should be cognizant of in unboxing for CPG? For the UK audience, anytime I mention CPG or FMCG, I’m going to also mention this in the intro.

Consumer product goods. In the world of retail or brick-and-mortar, the packaging design’s function is to sell to a consumer. When it comes to DTC, which is interesting, you’ve already made the purchasing decision based on the website, based on the images, and based on the social media presence. When it comes to the physical packaging of the box or the experience that shows up in the mail, its function is to post-rationalize the sale. Now you’ve already spent your money, you’ve already done it. What this is now doing is it has the opportunity to create a positive feedback loop to say, “I want to do this again.”

I remember Allbirds, the shoes, they come in these interesting proprietary shoe boxes. They open up differently. There’s this whole illustrative world that surrounds them and then you have these beautiful shoes inside. It creates a different impression than when I ordered Nike off of their website and it shows up in their standard box. A lot of digitally native brands should think about how to use that unboxing experience to create a differentiated, unique, and memorable moment that helps push them apart from all the other maybe more traditional brands.

I’ve seen it in a handful of ways. I’ve seen some smaller companies going out of the way to make handwritten notes and put those in. There’s so much more richness that you can do. I don’t know if you guys have this in the UK or have access to it but there’s a cookie brand out of Los Angeles that’s all DTC cookies. They have this over-the-top luxurious experience. That’s in line with the price point. You have to think about how are you supporting the price point and that varies widely on what you’re selling.

This cookie company called the Last Crumb, you’re paying $120 for 12 cookies. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever had. If you order one of these, you have a bunch of people that come over to your house. You want to make it this big unveil. You want to do a cookie-cutting tasting with everyone. The packaging, while extremely wasteful and not the complete opposite of sustainable, does play into what they’re all about, which is indulgence and luxuriousness. That’s in the product of the cookie and it’s also in the packaging, the messaging, and everything else.

There’s certainly a feedback loop when customers are sharing their unboxing experience online.

The virality of those elements is powerful too to your point.

What other critical facts or concepts should readers be cognizant of when it comes to packaging in retail environments? I want to speak later to wholesale. You guys have Costco, which is a completely different retail experience I have to say. What other critical concepts should we be aware of?

The Club is fascinating. Club, as that channel is called here in the United States, focuses on the what of the product. It’s what we call not a brand-building place but a place to move products. For instance, if you’re a Keto cookie and you have a strong brand, you’ll probably let your brand take a slight backseat and emphasize the word Keto Cookie or you’ll blow up the imagery to be as large as possible. Consumers want to know what is this product because it’s not necessarily a place of education so the packaging needs to be more education oriented.

People don’t read, they recognize. Click to Tweet

Secondarily, it’s a place where you’re looking for a bargain. You’re buying wholesale. You’re looking at the unit economics. You want to know, “How many bars are in here?” That needs to be a strong call-out you need to have. If it’s a variety pack, it’s clear and easy to understand that there are three different flavors inside of this thing. It’s a unique channel and a unique beast. A lot of Costco category managers who give brands feedback on their packaging say, “You need to change these things.”

You also need to think about how they palletize. What happens when you have four large-sized boxes all next to each other? Is there some continuous design pattern that links up from one to one? How do you stand out? The moment of the pallet. At a grocery store, you shop from 10 to 15 feet away. In Club or Costco, you might start your shopping journey from 30 feet away. If you see some crazy-looking palette, you go, “What is that?” Now you go over and look at it. Now you’re examining price, product, and flavors, “I want that.” Some interesting environments in that space are a good call out.

I want to ask you some more questions. Is there any other point you want to speak to like research? How deep do you research your customer or your target customer demographic? I’d like to understand your research process. You talked about being hyper-focused when you’re going to market, especially initially.

One thing that I didn’t cover is how big is Interact. We have two offices, one in Boulder, Colorado, and one in Austin, Texas. We have twenty employees and among them, we have a dedicated strategy team. We have brand strategists on staff that are central to a lot of the research needs and desires of our clients.

We’ll do a lot of primary research ourselves. We might be going out and speaking with consumers, doing shop-along with people in stores, and running surveys. We do a lot of social listening. We use a tool called Infegy that we like to employ at the outset of projects. If we’re talking about keto, probiotics, or protein bars, what do consumers have to say? What’s going on? Who are the actual users? It allows us to do a little bit of spying when people are freely talking about these brands, products, or spaces.

That’s how we’ll start our processes. Oftentimes, we’ll bring in partners that can do qualitative or quantitative studies. We can work with partners to do validation testing. We’d like to say that research is like a goldfish and it’ll grow to the size of the bowl, the bowl being dictated by how much a client wants to spend on research. We have a lot of different things but we always start our projects with strategy and most often, that’s clients wanting to know more about their specific consumer because we work with a lot of the challenger stage brands that do have differentiated consumers.

The final question, Fred, is what does it take to not just survive as a challenger brand but to break through and thrive? What key pillars of success are you seeing? This will transcend brands. I know the brand is part of that mix from your opinion.

We say no to a lot of client opportunities if we try their product and we don’t think it’s where it needs to be because design is one of the fastest ways to kill a brand. If you have great design but a subpar product, you’ll get a quick trial and a little repeat purchase. It will accelerate the death of your brand. The number one thing is to have a phenomenal product. It all comes back to that moment.

If you have a phenomenal product and then you build a phenomenal design on top of it, suddenly you have this relationship of a promise. Judging a book by its cover, you’re going to think, “This thing’s amazing.” You try it and it is and now you have a strong impression of the brand overall. You will be a repeat purchaser. You might become a loyal consumer.

The other thing, especially for challenger brands, there’s often a reluctance to try new things. You look at someone else who’s successful and try to emulate their playbook and that can be a dangerous thing to do at times. What got that company to where it’s at is not what will get you there most likely. A lot of entrepreneurial clients are their consumers, particularly in those early days. Honoring why they created that product, what the issues are that they see out in the space, and then working with teams like ours to help strategize around more long-term positioning helps future-proof them. Those are a couple of things that I’d say are necessary for challenger brands.

Thank you, Fred. I could go on and on. I would like to thank you for coming to the 2X eCommerce Podcast. For people who want to find out more about Interact, it’s InteractBrands.com. Are there any active social media platforms for your agency or that you are active on?

You can follow us on Instagram, look for @InteractBrands there. My LinkedIn is quite active, it’s @FredHart. You can follow the agency on LinkedIn as well. We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about all the other components of what makes us a successful company beyond branding and design. We go to fifteen food and beverage trade shows a year. We know the key retailers, brokers, R&D, food scientists, private equity, and venture groups, the list goes on and on. All those elements are required to be successful today. We see a lot of things, we hear a lot of things, and as a result, we understand the businesses of CPG more than the design that they require.

Out of curiosity, what are the top food and beverage events DTC and CPG brand operators should attend?

Expo West is the big one, it happens every March in Anaheim. It’s the place to go to see innovation. It will be extremely inundating in terms of stimulus. There are usually 80,000 attendees a year and over 5,000 brands. It’s a great place to see all the competition and see where the buzz is. In 2021, we went and there were 50 plant-based meat companies. As soon as we started to tally and we got up above 30, we knew that category is in deep trouble. There’s no way that all of these brands can live in that space and there’s going to be a real shake-up. There’s a crazy amount going on. That’s a great show.

There’s one in New York called The Fancy Food Show, which happens every summer. That one’s more specialty foods but it’s starting to bleed into natural and organic. It’s always an interesting one and it’s close to Europe, of course. Sweets and Snacks happen every year in Chicago. The Sweets and Snack show is focused mostly on the confectionery industry.

What’s refreshing about that show is no one’s worried about health claims or benefits. You’re selling candy, you’re selling fun. It’s all about emotion and all this other stuff. It’s a great reminder for the marketers and all of us that our product attributes are not the thing that defines our brand, the emotion is. These are companies that have nothing else but emotion to rely on.

Fred, thank you so much for coming on the 2X eCommerce Podcast. I appreciate it. Cheers.

Thanks so much, Kunle.

About the host:

Kunle Campbell

An ecommerce advisor to ambitious, agile online retailers and funded ecommerce startups seeking exponentially sales growth through scalable customer acquisition, retention, conversion optimisation, product/market fit optimisation and customer referrals.

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