Shop 'Til You Drop

We’ve all heard this expression, but recently, I have found a new meaning for it!

Simple said, it refers to the cluttered shelves that have been created in virtually every product category in your favorite retail store. You now, the clutter that makes it downright difficult to find what you want on shelf.

And by time you find what you want, you’re ready to drop.

It doesn’t even matter where you shop - grocery, mass merchants, drug stores – it’s all the same. Yet marketing teams never seem to learn. They continue to invent more products, concoct new flavors and conceive new forms all that look and feel similar to what already is on shelf.

I mean, do we really new 43 varieties of Crest toothpaste or 18 types of Oreos?

I often wonder if the great marketing minds that create all this shelf clutter have ever gone into a store and tried to make a selection – or better yet, watched how consumers shop their category.

Today the shopping experience is akin to going to the eye doctor. Locating what you want on the retail shelf is like reading an eye chart. After a while your develop eye strain. Perhaps consumers should ask their local store manager to set up places to sit in each aisle to allow them to recover from the shopping experience. Because no matter what aisle you shop, by time you find what you want, you’re ready to drop.

And it keeps getting worse!

Across all the marketing briefs I have seen over the last few years, from marketing teams in well-known companies representing brands we all buy, there is always embedded the same design objective. Can you guess what it is???

Make shopping the category easier!

Like that free spot on a bingo card, it’s always there – in every marketing brief. Hey fellas, you want to know the best way to improve shopability. Get rid of stuff!

But if you don’t believe my why don’t you ask consumers. I’m sure they will tell you how they feel, assuming they have fully recovered from their last shopping journey. – when they too found a new meaning for shop 'til you drop.

It makes no Brand Sense; it’s really…Brand NonSense.

Brand NonSense

If brand means to engrave an identity, then why do so many consumer product companies try so hard to destroy their identities in the marketplace?

What do I mean?

Well today it is quite common to see brands with distinct identities come out with new product variants served up in packaging that looks nothing like the established image of the brand. To me this actually serves to weaken the distinct and memorable brand associations that companies have tried to engrave in our minds. As someone who has been in the strategic branding and package design world of consumer products for 20 years, I wonder this myself. I don’t get it.

It was once so simple.

Red stood for Coke. Hershey’s was chocolate brown. Kodak was yellow. Clorox was blue, red and white. Tide was orangey red. And Windex was that aquamarine blue/green. It was easy to find these brands in the marketplace. They were constant, easily identified and yes, engraved in our minds.

Oh how things have changed. Finding these iconic brands in a grocery or mass channels these days has become an adventure. And even once you locate one; it is a challenge to sort out what variant you want.

Sure I get that line extensions and proliferation of product portfolios make the introduction of new colors and imagery necessary, but why would you give away an equity that you have owned and that has an emotional connection with consumers.

It makes no Brand Sense; it’s really…Brand NonSense.