Consumer Goods Technology

Appearance Matters SEVENTH GENERATION TAKES A CONSUMER-CENTRIC APPROACH TO PACKAGING INNOVATION

Seventh Generation ( www.seven-thgeneration.com) is committed to becoming the world’s most trusted brand of authentic, safe and envi-ronmentally-responsible products for a healthy home.

“For us, innovation begins by improving our ability to see our work with a greater level of consciousness,” says Courtney Loveman, brandmother for Seventh Generation. “It entails putting our efforts toward making products that aren’t merely less bad, but more holistically good, in ways that consider social and environmental progress.”

Nature Calls for Differentiation For 20 years, the company has been at the forefront of a cultural change in consumer behavior and business ethics. But a coming flood of mega-brand entries into its eco-friendly niche recently prompted Seventh Generation to take a consumer-cen-

tric approach to updating its packaging designs.

So, for the past three years, Loveman focused on developing a more brand-centric culture within the organization. This task included the establishment of design standards to improve the consistency and strength of the Seventh Generation brand for consumers through the evolution of its look, feel, voice and attitude.

“We often heard from our most loyal consumers that they appreciated our willingness to provide them with a significant amount of information, whether on our packaging, on our Web site or on the telephone,” explains Loveman. “Simultaneously, we heard from existing and new users that the information we were providing was sometimes difficult to find or read.”

Consumer feedback also revealed that shoppers recognized the Seventh Generation brand, but not

AFTER

Consumers of Seventh Generation products favored a natural/colorless design approach with the company’s name and recognizable leaf logo prominently displayed on the package.

always by name. “They looked for the leaf,” reveals Loveman.

Thus, a label evolution project was launched that would incorporate consumer feedback in a way that would improve readability, overall shelf presence, brand recognition (both of the name and logo) and still maintain the company’s core values.

Natural Selection

Based on the importance of consumers to the design process, Seventh Generation enlisted an innovative online research technology that relies entirely on consumers to optimize and refine packaging designs.

“We partnered with Affinnova ( www.affinnova.com) to use its IDDEA process, which uniquely taps into the opinions and desires of consumers without resorting to the often biased and limited approaches of more traditional qualitative and quantitative research methodologies,” explains Loveman.