Simeon Goldstein: Thinking outside the bottle

They’re all good-looking designs (see below) that would catch my attention in the supermarket wine aisle. O-I has created the concepts to demonstrate how brands can use packaging to catch shoppers’ attention in store and come up with a product that really stands out against a sea of standard 75cl bottles.

The argument is that, even in a highly traditional market like wine, new sizes and shapes can communicate a product message and encourage brand loyalty.

Of course, innovative shapes are nothing new. Take yoghurts. The one that stands out from the crowd for me is the Müller Fruit Corner with its distinctive two-compartment format.

And in the wine category, too, Portuguese wine Mateus Rosé has a distinctively shaped bottle. Then, there’s the HP square bottle, the Pringles tube and the Toblerone pyramid carton, that grabbed the top spot in our Most Admired Brands survey.

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But if innovative packaging is a winner, why are so many products packaged in the same format as their rivals, special editions notwithstanding.

Cost is clearly an important factor and standardisation makes it easier to run a large number of similar products through the same system. And then there’s the environment. After all, the production of a different shape of product might require more material and could affect how easily it can be transported.

There is clearly room for different packs like O-I’s and other packaging firms are undoubtedly producing their own examples. But while everyone acknowledges the role packaging plays in the marketing of products, the challenge is to get more brands interested in doing things differently.

Alcohol is perhaps a good market for novel packaging shapes because of the relatively high product values, but is it too conservative?

Different packaging shapes, though, might just get consumers to start thinking about packaging as something more than what they see at the bottom of their rubbish bin. And that, of course, would be something the whole industry could drink to.

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