FLEXO: As you mentioned, you have those offices and you’re global. Can a package be designed once and then used in every market around the world?
Griffin: Yes, I can think of many examples. Take Coca-Cola, or Oil of Olay or Head & Shoulders. Sometimes a brand might have some minor variants in the back of the pack. But overall, the brand look and feel generally—If it has been designed for the global market, you don’t have to change anything. To take a local brand and make it suitable for the global market is a skilled discipline in itself and a lot of times it isn’t effective. So, when we took on Oil of Olay years back, we had about 26 variants of the name Oil of Olay, and we started pulling it all into one. You have to get consistency.
And consider: What are your reasons for going global if, in each country is a different look and feel? You get no consistency or synergies.
FLEXO: In terms of the packaging structure, do those regulations have to change globally for a prominent brand?
If you suddenly said that for the next launch or season you’re going to do Pringles with sparkly purple and orange, you start losing consumers. It might be trendy or retro seventies, but you could be damaging the brand in the process.
Griffin: No, I don’t think so. I think probably, they change because of sizing, like the U.S. using fluid ounces. But apart from that, there are not great dissimilarities from country to country. Now, the biggest drive generally is the environmental systems.
FLEXO: Moving back to branding, the heart of pi is brand shaping. Can you explain brand shaping?
Griffin: Brand shaping is really all about hitting all the touchpoints a consumer is going to experience throughout the brand from online, shelf, in home, in use, in disposable—in every aspect of the brand. So, the expertise of the business is to see where the brand is, understand where the brand is going and see where its key equities are. It might be expanding consumers groups or new markets, or it could be repositioning the product or bringing it up to date. It’s a range of dynamics.
FLEXO: How does that process start when you have a brief that says the client wants to reposition?
Griffin: By looking at the market, talking to consumers and immersing yourself in the brand, so you know all its dimensions and all the parameters, so you have a very clear picture of the territory you’re aiming for and a very clear picture of where you want to get to.
FLEXO: How much market research do you have to do with consumers when you reposition?
Griffin: It depends on the product. Often the client has done a lot of research already and sometimes, depending on the client, they’ve got a really clear idea about the consumer they want to hit and their brand values. So, you are working with the client to hit the target.
FLEXO: When a brand comes to you to reposition—What if it wants to change or update too frequently or too infrequently?
Griffin: Yeah, it depends. If a big brand feels like it has to move a long way from where it already is, then you have to have a step process; you wouldn’t do it in one move. We have seen some disasters on the market, where [a CPC has] moved the brand too far, too many steps to try to get where it wants to be.
Babycham would be an example, which I’ve always loved. It’s been a green bottle its whole life, then at some point in the late 1980s, this agency took it to blue and a completely different shape. The core equity of the brand was the use of this young deer called “Bambi.” I think they relegated [Bambi] to some other aspect of the advertising and changed its character quite significantly. It lasted not long before they switched back to green and Bambi and everything they had switched from in the first place.
You don’t want to lose the core equity of the brand and create a disconnect. If consumers loved a new design and had been waiting for that brand to do that for years, then that brand has misread its consumers.
FLEXO: So, thinking about print, since this is a print magazine, how much does your design team think about the printability of what it is creating?
We tend to be looking at where the consumer’s mind is rather than try and see if it is in some odd color or new color.
Griffin: Generally, we are always starting with the substrate. So, we know it’s going to be flexo or its going to be gravure or it’s going to be litho or whatever. We have a technical team that understands these things so they would understand the limitations. If you haven’t got that team, then you should probably go and talk to the manufacturers so you get the parameters of print before you launch into it. We have many jobs for print where there is fabulous execution of subtle tones and tints and emotive stuff, which they are trying to shove through the gravure press or flexo press. They don’t understand.
Because if a designer says to build this house out of polystyrene bricks because they are light and they are white, that’s still not a clever idea if the bricks are going to melt. The designer ultimately has to know—it doesn’t mean the designer has to push the technology—but does have to have a basic understanding of what it is. And we have seen and picked up work because someone has messed up and really not understood the limits of a specific process. To stretch the process, you really have to understand it.
FLEXO: Finally, is there a brand evolution that you love?
Griffin: My favorite one is Head & Shoulders, where it’s gone from a single proposition to a much, much larger single proposition that captures a much larger audience because it’s more conducive. Now you can talk to the different audiences through advertising because that can change and people can just breeze through it and not realize it was talking to them, it was talking to their granny or their daughter or whatever, and when the ad resonates with them, they can get it. If it’s the packaging sitting on the shelf, it has to work for everyone in every market. Head & Shoulders executes this very well.
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