Tailford Mitchell Blog

In an increasingly environmentally conscious society, sustainability is becoming an important concept for all companies to implement into their business strategies. Justin’s Nut Butters, a small nut company in Boulder, Colorado is making every effort to keep sustainability at the forefront of its production process. The company uses only natural and organic ingredients, and its cardboard is made with 100 percent recycled paper. Justin’s headquarters are even solar powered.

Despite all of these sustainable initiatives, Justin’s packaging is hindering the company from being able to truly live out its sustainability mission. Its petroleum-based packaging can stay in landfills for more than 1,000 years, according to David Slayden from Ad Age. Slayden mentioned that the only other alternative is squeeze packs, which stray from the industry standard in packaging and are much more expensive to produce. Switching over to squeeze packs, an effort Justin’s is committing to pursue, will be a hefty challenge for a small company. Making a profit will inevitably be slow once the packages take off.

Green Mountain Coffee, producers of the favorable and convenient K-Cups are on the other side of the spectrum. The New York Times reported that the single use packages accounted for 80 percent of their profit, according to the sustainable is good website. Along with this large profit comes a large pile of unsustainable, plastic trash.

Green Mountain has banked on the K-Cups because they are providing a product that their market wants. Are people going to stop buying them because they’re not environmentally friendly? Justin’s is willing to sacrifice profits in order to make the environment better, but is that a smart business move in the long run? No matter what the product, the sustainability of its packaging needs to be considered from start to finish while maintaining the demands of consumers.  Lost profits will be avoided and consumers will appreciate that they are contributing to a more sustainable environment.

We are pleased to see that our work for Ciao Bella gelato and sorbet is being shared with the world of packaging design!

Check out our feature on the Dieline. This is a website that promotes all kinds of package designs ranging from food and beverages to shoes and books.

 http://www.thedieline.com/

Today is a great day in the office! We are celebrating Christmas in July. The smell of fresh zucchini and chocolate chip muffins is spreading throughout the kitchen while Christmas movie classics including, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Home Alone are playing on the TV. Sparkly Christmas lights are stranded along nearly every room, and we even have a Christmas tree with presents! Well, they’re white elephants of course, but sometimes those can be the best!

Christmas in July seems to be a popular event happening in several other places as well. According to Sandra Jones from Chicago Breaking Business website, Target spread some early Christmas spirit with online sales on more than 500 items last week. Sears also joined in the summer festivities this month by reviving its “Christmas Lane” and Christmas Club savings card, according to the website.

Christmas is a time when families come together to relax, reminisce, and share traditions with each other. Here at Tailford Mitchell we are definitely one big family! Although we are celebrating Christmas twice this year, our cheeriness and laughter that usually is associated with Christmas lasts all year long.

Brand loyalty only happens when you know your audience and what they want. So, when should a company end a practice they’ve been using for many years to reach out to and communicate with its consumers? When its consumers tell it to!

According to a BizReport article by Helen Leggatt, Ben & Jerry’s has stopped sending its email newsletters because their customers expressed that they would rather be reached through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

I think this was a very smart move for Ben & Jerry’s. They discovered that a long –standing business practice of sending emails to its customers was no longer effective and therefore, are no longer wasting time by continuing to send them. Now they can spend more time enhancing their communication efforts on Facebook, Twitter and their website. Using these social media outlets allows Ben & Jerry’s to really engage with their consumers the way they want to be engaged. Ben & Jerry’s showed that they value their consumers’ opinions and as a result, responded to their needs. Consumers who feel like they are valued and have a voice are much more likely to be loyal to the brand. They will always come back for more…and in this case it’s ice cream!

An article I came across by Roy White from Retail Wire talks about the importance of innovation in all companies. The article compared different-sized companies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. White explains that innovation in big CPGs is more structured and based on extensive market research, but less structured and experience-based for small ones.  He gives examples of two small companies, The Ginger People and Lazy Dog Cookie Co, Inc. who have found success through unique innovation strategies.

 According to the article, The Ginger People is a producer of candy, beverages, baked goods and ginger products such as ginger snaps, ginger beer and ginger syrup. This company goes out and gets the market information they need by talking to experienced chefs from other stores. After the economy plummeted, The Ginger People gathered information that showed home cooking was increasing and consumers might want to gear their purchases toward flavors to enhance their homemade meals. In order to satisfy this finding, they created the “Pantry Essentials” product line. Lazy Dog found innovation through a new channel of distribution. The company saw an opportunity in pet store specialty food. So, Lazy Dog began making “Pup- PIES,” birthday cakes for dogs.

Small, privately- held companies like The Ginger People and Lazy Dog are usually ones started by entrepreneurs. Innovation can come more easily to these companies because they have more to gain. Take for example, a person who wants to start a business selling cupcakes. He or she has never sold cupcakes but wants to take a gamble on them anyway. If the cupcakes don’t bring much success, this person doesn’t have much to lose. Another person has been in the cupcake industry for several successful years and attributes 80 percent of their business to cupcakes. Now the person wants to start selling pizza— he or she would risk losing a lot. Small companies who can take more risk but risk losing the least have the greatest ability to be innovative.

Mountain Dew has consistently used crowd-sourcing in national campaigns. In an article written by Karl Greenberg from Media Post News, one of Mountain Dew’s previous campaigns involved consumers’ input for a new flavor and its package design. Greenburg interviewed Mountain Dew’s Brand Manager Hudson Sullivan who said consumers loved the art and entire concept of the campaign. Now Mountain Dew is turning to crowd-sourcing once again.

According to the article, Sullivan said the main focus of the new campaign is to engage consumers and make them part of the process. Sullivan also emphasized that this was a way for Mountain Dew to build brand equity by allowing consumers to be “emotionally invested.” According to Greenberg, Mountain Dew is partnering with skateboarder Paul Rodriguez and Don Pendleton, a skate artist to promote the campaign. The campaign is a competition between 35 skateboard shops to have their designs on limited-edition Mountain Dew cans.

This campaign is a good example of how a big, successful company like Pepsi’s Mountain Dew is not just concerned with creating awareness through media advertising but really cares about its consumers and their ideas. Many companies cannot afford to do media advertising, but can afford to change their packaging and thinking. Creating a unique product through crowd-sourcing is cost-effective and definitely lets consumers feel like the product is made just for them.

A recent article by Jack Neff from Ad Age talked about a study conducted by the Nielson Co. According to Neff, the study found the more that senior-level execs from package-goods companies get involved in the new-product development process, the less successful those products are.

New product launches are often very risky, and the majority of them end up failing. When coming up with new products or design concepts, bosses have a higher tendency to push their personal opinions into the process. Their opinions may have nothing to do with what the end consumer desires, but because their employees are too afraid to disagree, they go along with the ideas anyway. Unfortunately for those companies with too much top-level involvement, this kind of mindset limits them on what they are able to achieve.

Execs need to understand that ideas can generate from many different places. The important thing is to take a step back and let employees develop those ideas and shape them into something great. When this happens, new products have a much better chance of succeeding.

Consumers who have had their tastes expanded by celebrity chef’s who continually push the boundaries, the Food Network and growing availability of more ethnic foods.  Thanks to this, they are demanding more intensity and variety in everything from potato chips to chewing gum to beverages and more.  Food marketers need to stay up with this important trend.  You can learn more in an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal titled “A Taste for Hotter, Mintier, Fruitier” .

Congratulations to our client Noble Juices for placing third in a recent taste test beating out several of the biggest brands.  The quality of their juice was the reason, but we’d like to think that our package design didn’t hurt!

Richard LaMotta, a true entrepreneur and inventor of the Chipwich sandwich passed away last Tuesday.  Over the year we have designed many variations of the iconic Chipwich package . You read details of his life in the New York Times obituary.