New audience, new pitch
Companies try to keep close tabs on who their customers are, but sometimes they can be taken by surprise. Such was the case with Dole Packaged Foods. The fruit company answered the call for healthy snacks by making Dole Fruit Bowls perfect for kids’ lunchboxes. Three years after the product hit the market, Dole researchers discovered that rather than buying them for kids, women, especially single women aged 25–35, were buying for themselves.

Dole worked with Addis to redesign the Dole Fruit Bowls packaging to address young, busy, professional women looking for healthy snack options. Most of the “grab-and-go” aisle in the grocery store is fairly kid-focused, so Addis’s objectives were to design a package that clearly spoke the language of an older audience. The aim was to communicate the simplicity of the convenience food, and to promote the freshness and healthiness of the product. The designers chose bold, simple images and bright, natural colors to gracefully sell that story.

BEFORE The original Dole Fruit Bowls packaging was aimed at attracting kids, with a lot of color and motion. Each variety bore its own unique, bold color. The package used individual pieces of fruit raining from above, as well as chunky, shadowed, bouncing type and a spotlight glow in the background to create excitement.

AFTER With a new client demographic, Dole regrouped to create women friendly packaging.

Changing faces
When a brand is particularly revered, a manufacturer may see an opportunity to take it to the next tier, boosting it into a higher-priced category. A packaging redesign may be just what’s needed for this My Fair Lady approach.

Aveeno is a well-known brand of lotion; in fact, as is often the case with many long-time brands, the name became synonymous with natural colloidal oatmeal, which doctors and mothers for decades had valued as a remedy for itching. The existing lotion bottle had a hard rectangular shape and used straightforward blue and white colors.

When manufacturer Johnson & Johnson discussed a new approach with LMS Design, the designers learned that the majority of Aveeno buyers were women. To leverage the brand’s trustworthiness and use of natural ingredients, LMS Design arrived at a softer, curvier packaging design to help relaunch Aveeno at a higher price point.

BEFORE Aveeno lotion was confined to a bottle design that was straightforward and even somewhat masculine: rectangular and simple white with blue accents. Yet the primary audience has always been women.

AFTER In the final designs, the line of facial products sticks to a higher-end look, with elegant, pearly white and sage green. The bath products, which are in a slightly lower price range, introduce brighter colors to appeal to a wider variety of shoppers.