Thanks again for all the great comments guys – I can’t tell you how helpful this discussion has been.
This is part of the reason we are thinking of going with a semi-retro theme for not just the packaging but for our advertising message as well. The project we’re working on is designed to incorporate elements from our finance, accounting, statistics, organizational behavior as well as marketing classes, so our proposals have to be grounded in what we’ve learned in each of them. Alka-Seltzer has great brand recognition and consumer awareness (in a survey we conducted, 97% of 200 respondents were at least somewhat familiar with the brand), but no sense of what it is actually supposed to be. We want to play off the brand’s history and take advantage of a couple of current trends: consumers losing faith in pharmaceutical and consumer health companies, tendency to turn to familiar and well-known brands during times of recession/hardship, increasing interest in “one-symptom, one-medication” formulations, current 60s nostalgia (e.g., Mad Men), etc. etc. Alka-Seltzer was at it’s peak in the 50s and 60s and we want to remind consumers of a happier, simpler time in their lives. We also plan on proposing a reformulation of the product, swapping out aspirin for acetominaphen to make it safer and gentler on stomachs.
From an organizational perspective, we specifically wanted to avoid going with something trendy just for the sake of doing so (e.g., there’s a group looking at a brand of bottled water that’s going with a “green” theme, a household cleaning product going “sustainable” and a group doing canned soup that’s looking to go organic) if the concept had no grounding in the brand’s DNA. With Alka-Seltzer, using a retro theme actually allows us to tap in that DNA.
Since I’m coming at this from a decidedly un-ID perspective, can you explain a bit about what you mean by adding order and composition?