Published January 22nd, 2007
in Groceries and Personal Favorites.
Those nuts at Publix have done it again. Pecans, walnuts and sliced almonds are now available in a Publix baking aisle near you. The slogans are particularly witty, but that pesky “which word to highlight” issue pops up again.
On the pecans, the line reads “Pecan-can.” The white flood on the bag leaves three strategically shaped areas open, and a simple sketch completes the picture of three pecans dancing. Clever! Some of us can also feel vindicated by the confirmation of correct pronunciation—after all, if the nuts are going to dance, they’re not going to do the “cahn-can!”
Onto more important matters…the highlighted attribute of this title is “PecanHalves.” There’s no subtitle, and they use the two-color sans-serif variation on the title. The walnuts have a similar setup. “Walnuts” is the emphasized word, and the line reads “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall-nut.” (Awesome.) There’s a matching sketch. But the sliced almonds take a different approach. The transparent area of the bag is in the shape of a cleaver, and the tagline is “Slice, slice baby” This is all amazing. But the emphasized word is “sliced.” What’s that about? Seems to me that “almonds” should have the emphasis to keep in line with the rest of the nuts.
But, the choice of emphasis words has long confused me. It’s sure not a decision I’d like to make, because sometimes one word is more fitting than another. But at least within the same product line—if not the entire line—make it consistent!
Lest I lose sight of my original impression, though, these nuts are amazing. The taglines are great!
Published November 10th, 2006
in Groceries and Personal Favorites.
This is definitely a personal favorite. I hold a special place in my heart for chocolate, and especially chocolate chips. These semi-sweet morsels contribute to one of the best recipes ever created: chocolate chip cookies.
Publix rolled out the new packaging on baking chips several months ago. With the new packaging came a few new varieties of chips, too, I believe, making the store line fully competitive with the name brand options.
For the most part, the coloring on the Publix chips is consistent with general perception of what the product’s color is. For example, the butterscotch package uses a yellow-orange shade, the milk-chocolate package uses a rich and creamy brown color, etc. But the one pictured here— semi-sweet—uses a red color. As the comment a few posts back mentioned, this makes it look like strawberry chips or something! I suppose they chose the red color because brown is on the milk-chocolate chips, but what about using a second shade of brown? (Like the old light-brown / dark-brown M&M’s!)
Overall, though, this package is great. They used an illustration of the product, but no witty humor like on the snack products. I think this is indicative of when they designed the package, though—only the newer packages have the humor. Plus, this is in the baking products category, and most of the baking products use a similar strategy.
Published November 10th, 2006
in Groceries, Long Time Coming and Rants.
The canned-food aisle got a makeover a few months ago. One or two cans came out at first, then all of the sudden everything was converted. And they look great.
Publix had a pretty extensive line of canned vegetables already, so this is not one of the areas where we see a lot of new products introduced with the new packaging. I think the selection has expanded a little bit, though. For example, I could be mistaken, but I believe there are more vegetables with reduced salt or no salt at all.
The packaging is consistent with the other products in this general category: a serif font for the emphasized product word combined with a traditional product shot. I appreciate that the designers picked colors corresponding to the products when selecting the colors to use on the labels. I would imagine it was a little tricky to select several distinguishable shades of green, but they pulled it off rather well. The cans are infinitely better than the previous store brand version, and in my opinion they’re now better looking than the brand names, too. And as always, the products themselves taste great and can compete nicely with the so-called real thing.
The only part of this packaging that I object to is the same thing I often object to: the word choice for the emphasized part. Notice in this picture that the middle can is labeled as “No Salt.” Lots of the vegetables have no-salt varieties now, and lots are green as well. (Different shades of green, though.) It’s hard to tell what the product is from a distance. It makes the shopper pick up the can and read it carefully to make sure it’s the desired product. In this specific case, it’s kind of hard to tell whether the can contains green beans or peas. (I think it’s peas.) The emphasis works better on the top can (”French Style”), but that’s because there’s only one vegetable that that phrase applies to: green beans. I’m sure it must be a hard decision, though, because I recognize that if the vegetable names were highlighted, a similar quandary would result. Instead of struggling to differentiate peas from beans, shoppers would have to work to identify the particular style of beans, etc. An interesting problem…
This is one of my favorites. It took a long time to switch over to the new design, but boy it looks better. It follows the same style common of most snack foods—a simple sans-serif-looking serif font for the big name, and a unique product shot with a witty saying below.
The house built from crackers is a great way of showing the product. It’s also a great setup for the tagline “Honey, I’m home.”
I’ve ranted before about using the descriptive word as the highlight, thus forcing shoppers to read the fine print to know what the product is. In this case, though, it works out well. “Honey Graham” probably is the best thing to highlight. Makes it easy to see at a glance that the box contains graham crackers. Odd, isn’t it? Not sure what the best method is overall. Consistency is typically key, but not in this case. Perhaps some rewriting is in order so that each product can be emphasized in the same manner.
Published September 29th, 2006
in Household Products.
Publix brought out these lightbulbs a while ago. They come in a number of varieties, and the packaging looks similar on each. Similar and sweet.
You can tell at first glance that the design is one of the older ones: It’s a line drawing of the products. That was an earlier technique. They used a sans-serif font throughout, which is also a sign of its age. But the thing that really gives it away is that they used all capital letters—this is a dead giveaway.
Each variety features a different color, but a similar image. This is another example of featuring the adjective rather than the product, though in this case I think that works. “40 Watt” speaks to lightbulbs, but “Junior” could be anything. (See aforementioned rant.) Another great piece!
