Advertising shifts from media to packaging

The rise of the Internet and hundreds of television channels, means marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials. They are now using their bottles, cans, boxes and plastic packs to improve sales by attracting the eyes of consumers, who often make most of their shopping decisions at the last minute while standing in front of store shelves.

“The media is fragmented, and we can’t find people — we can’t get them to sit down and listen to our argument on a television spot,” said Jerry Kathman, chief executive of LPK, a brand agency based in Cincinnati. “The package can convey that argument.”

In the last 100 years, Pepsi had changed the look of its can [click here to view can design gallery], and before that its bottles, only 10 times. This year alone, the soft-drink maker will switch designs every few weeks. Kleenex, after 40 years of sticking with square and rectangular boxes, has started selling tissues in oval packages. Coors Light bottles now have labels that turn blue when the beer is chilled to the right temperature.

Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers’ attention. Shoppers have also grown accustomed to looking for a little visual pop on aisle shelves as design has become a mainstream marketing tool.

“Consumers are looking for what’s new,” said Kimberly Drosos, director for package development at Unilever North America, which recently changed the shape of its Suave shampoo bottles for the first time in 25 years, and sells Axe shower gel bottles shaped like video-game joysticks.

There are many other reasons behind the shift. Some packaging changes are occurring because companies are trying to shrink container sizes and reduce their environmental impact, or because of new approaches for old products (Orbit now sells gum in a bottle made to fit in a car’s cup holder). Some brands use "desiger" packaging to brag that their bottles of cleansers and other household products are attractive enough to be left out in plain view, rather than hidden in a closet or drawer.

In the next few years, Pepsi drinkers may smell a sweet aroma that is sprayed out when they pop open Pepsi cans — such as a wild cherry scent misting from a Wild Cherry Pepsi can. Executives at the company have also considered cans that can spray a light water mist when they are opened, but they are unlikely to add that feature soon because of the cost, they say.

Some companies are studying technology to put a computer chip and tiny speaker inside a package. This idea might be particularly useful for big companies like Unilever that want to cross-promote their various brands. So a package of cheese could say, “I go well with Triscuit crackers” when a shopper takes it off the shelf. As the costs of the chips come down, marketing executives said this and other technologies would appear more on shelves.