‘What’s the truth about how Coke’s bottle design came about?’
Q: We’re in the consumer food and beverage business. One of the things we’ve learned to be careful about is our packaging. We’re all great admirers of the Coca-Cola bottle design.
We’re introducing a new fruit juice brand. We’re a bit stuck in the packaging design phase. We’re thinking of holding a contest among employees so that it’ll be quick. In addition, our marketing director said contest is an ideal technique to the design issue because this was how the Coca-Cola bottle design came about.
Our product development people “corrected” our marketing guy. They said this is not true. They heard that Coca-Cola had a well-known packaging designer who did the job.
We learned that you are AIM’s Coca-Cola Professor of International Marketing. So you must know what’s true. Please tell us what is the truth about how the Coca-Cola bottle design came about.
Will you please also tell us what you favor: running a contest or getting a signature packaging designer?
A: Let’s start with a quick correction. I (the senior MRx-er) was that professor at AIM but not anymore. I’ve retired since 2004.
The real truth according to Coca-Cola’s COO, Steve Heyer, is that the Coca-Cola bottle design came out of a professional engagement with bottle designer way back in 1915. The Coca-Cola Company at that time got the design services of Earl Dean of the Root Glass Company. Coca-Cola’s contract with Earl Dean was to design a bottle that any consumer “can recognize by touch even in the dark.”
We’re told that Dean’s inspiration came from his observing a pod of cocoa bean. When he translated that image into the concrete, the result was that unique bottle with ridged contours.
According to Heyer, it was an “instant icon” and for a good number of years, Coca-Cola leveraged on the bottle’s “sexy” shape to communicate the brand’s positioning.
By the 1990s when more and more beverage brands including Coke started shifting to can, Martin Lindstrom in his best-selling book, Brand Sense, tells us that Coca-Cola invested in a certain “Project Can.” That was in 1996. Project Can’s objective was to transform the Coke in can to take the shape of the ridged contoured bottle. Lindstrom narrates that by the end of 2000, the first prototype of the bottle-shaped aluminum can was ready for production. But engineers quickly discovered a problem. When stacked, the can could not carry the content weight without getting deformed or collapsing. Package designers were unable to find a quick solution. So Coca-Cola decided to abandon “Project Can.” Lindstrom called the abandonment “premature.” He noted that in 2001, Japan’s Daiwa developed for Sapporo Breweries “the world’s first bottle-shaped can.” That same year saw its market launch and we’re told that it was “an instant success.”
We now proceed to your second question: How does this approach to packaging design stack up against the by-contest approach?
Actually, resorting to contest for innovating in package design has taken on a solid scientific basis and logic. It was the MIT professor of Innovation Management and Engineering Systems, Eric Von Hippel, who developed the innovation model in his own 2005 bestseller book, Democratizing Innovation. Von Hippel’s main thesis says that it is more the consumers as users who innovate. It is less the marketers and manufacturers. So to succeed in innovation, watch and monitor how consumers solve their daily as well as emerging problems. Von Hippel refers to the resultant innovation as “an open, user, crowd-sourced or community-driven innovation.”
“Threadless” is probably the most popular example of a contest-driven user innovation. This is a T-shirt company that pioneered an online business model of a “crowd-sourced design.”
Its founders, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, started the company using as seed money, the $1,000 they won from an Internet T-shirt design contest.
Here’s how the business model was made to work.
Each member of the online Threadless Community works on a T-shirt design that each believed is innovative. Then these designers submit their T-shirt designs to the Threadless website. Community members plus visitors are asked to score each submitted design on a 0 to 5 point scale with zero as lousy and 5 as outstanding.
The Threadless website says that in any given week, it gets about 1,500 designs. During that week, the Threadless managers and staff choose the ten most voted designs. These designs are printed and sold via the Threadless online store. Each chosen designer gets $2,000 in cash, a $500 in GCs each of which can be traded in for $200 in cash plus an additional $500 for every reprint. Since it began in 2000 and in five years, Threadless has sold more than 4 million originally designed T-shirts.
So there are your options for deciding on your new brand’s packaging design.
Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!
