Learnings on brainy design, authenticity, and the importance of brands from Michael Duffy
Brandingmag
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global creative director?
"We live in a world where emotions are cultivated for profit, and the use of aesthetics to activate micro-stressors hedges towards the unethical. Triggering a jarring feeling or confusion within the consumer calls for responsible handling — the aim isn’t to distress, it is to tell a story."
Michael has always been involved with packaging and branding, and has extensive experience specifically within the own brand sector across numerous international markets. His core focus is to effectively lead Equator’s global creative team, ensuring that everyone works together and collaborates effectively across all sites and creative departments.
OUR TOP PICKS FROM MICHAEL
To be impactful and achieve reach, both the visual architecture and messaging must be synergetic, unique, steeped in meaning, and in tune with the needs of the audience. In packaging, this means the phasing out of old tropes, and replacing them with fresh expressions which give authenticity, locality, and purpose new meaning.
The future of branding is the evolution of authenticity. The pendulum is swinging away from the more cartoonish cues and representations of authenticity (a decade or two ago, chopsticks or a conical Asian hat were used to represent the authenticity of Chinese flavors). In the new era of branding, we are moving towards a more natural “corner shop” look and feel. The pared-back look implies sophistication as much as it does a localized consumer experience; at the same time, it elevates brand perception.
The packaging cues are not and will not be those of the past, so how do we now communicate factors such as luxury? The old elements – the metallic foils, the glitz and glitter – may still have their place and category, but these are beginning to be phased out in favor of a sleeker, cleaner aesthetic, with great textural consideration. The ‘ritual’ of unpacking that comes with an Apple product, for example, is what many savvy brands set their stall by today. Packaging of this kind zeroes in on the customer’s sensory experience and elevates it.
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Despite recent increases in research pertaining to the human brain, how our grey matter functions, how it stores and retrieves memories and how it reasons, understands, and heals are all areas around which a great deal remains unknown. But we do have some insight into our minds’ frameworks and how they help us make decisions. When we take a psychological approach to packaging design, we can definitively say that for packaging design to be effective it must trigger positive emotions while working within the construct already held in the consumer’s unconscious mind. To begin with, let’s unpack the differences between processes of the conscious mind and those of the unconscious, and briefly examine how they work together.
I believe that dissonance is emerging as packaging design’s latest disruptive tool. Dissonance is more likely to be picked up by small brands, since large, long-established brands usually build their messaging around broad appeal and as such are less willing to take risks. It’s the smaller brands, the newcomers and the niche, who are likely to leverage a little-loved design trend to gain standout. There’s a lot to be learned from dissonance, from its fine art origins to the way designers access it, to when a great idea can go terribly wrong.
This may have the familiarity of ice cream, but with the most ‘mustardy’ of mustard-yellow hues, and the oh-so-familiar French’s branding, the concept plays with our expectations in a clever way.
To gain cut-through amid the noise, a brand needs to be perceived as relevant to the individual. [...] To be relevant is to get into the heads of customers to be able to connect to their hearts and minds. Understanding informs strategy and action where the product or service positioning shows how it meets those needs and can integrate seamlessly into customers’ lives.
For example, Spotify “asserted its relevance by disrupting a category and providing a customer-centric platform that democratized access to music. It remains relevant by sticking to that tenet – as customer-centric and deeply connected to what its customers are craving. By understanding listening habits or tuning into cultural trends and what matters to its users, Spotify’s positioning is beyond being a streaming service and more as a content creator and as a brand that values meaningful contribution.
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