How to Evaluate Package Design: Fruit Fix Case Study

The most brilliant marketing strategies will fail if communication is ineffective; there is no way around it.

Package design is just one form of marketing communication, in essence no different from others. Its effectiveness is crucial for a product to be a success. Bad design will cause certain failure.

Surely, for such a critical function, amongst competent and experienced marketing managers there should be some consensus on what constitutes effective communication. Do you not agree?

After making 670 creative presentations over the last fourteen years, our experience is that when faced with a choice of several strategically appropriate creative concepts, it is hard to predict what any manager will pick. It is like Vegas, except the bets are bigger.

Are there techniques that managers could learn that would help them make more objective—and better—decisions about marketing communications? We believe there are, but first we wanted to find out if decisionmaking was as arbitrary as we believed.

We picked a real packaging design project: the launch of a new fruit beverage called Fruit Fix.

We asked a number of experienced marketing practitioners, most of them middle or senior marketing managers and some experienced designers, to comment on the effectiveness of eight label concepts and select the best one.

Was there an overwhelming consensus on which designs would be sure winners?

No. There was little consensus.

The results confirm our experience that decisionmaking about design is very subjective. And while it may be an exaggeration to say it is like Vegas, the decisions tend to reflect the background and personality of the marketing manager rather than any commonly agreed criteria for effective design.

Maybe in this case it doesn’t matter? Maybe the design concepts would all be successful in the market or all failures. If you think this, you would be wrong. The majority of the concepts are problematic enough to cause the product to fail, yet the product has been launched and is doing well.