More Stupid Than the Others

A while ago, I was babbling about packaging, a subject quite dear to my heart (or should I say eye first) because I’m one of those people that like things aesthetically pleasing to the eye. In a sea of people that love clutter, I’ll be looking at ways to get rid of it, reading swissmiss, trendir, and adding random pictures with feature ingenious solutions on flickr (although lately it’s been mostly about food).

I like innovative packaging and I like seeing that something I consume has changed the way it looks, whether it’s just a font, a slight facelift, rearranging the boxes on the orange juice carton . Heck, a while ago someone claimed that the default font size should increase because it’s too tiny so I’d imagine all the ingredients, storage, nutrition and whatnot boxes have had to be moved.

Last beer client I’ve dealt with had a very big issue with the look of the bottle – you see, in Romania the way your bottle looks shows off your status when ordering a drink in a bar. There are no pubs, there’s no fish and chip shop, there is no such thing as a ‘high street’, there’s no deli store because anything you can find in a deli store you can find in a supermarket and generally people are far more preoccupied with getting ahead rather than settling in a suburban or even countryside house. They’re not yet tired of advertising and they’re not yet tired of being subjects to all sorts of programmes advertisers might come up with. Simply put because they’ve not had enough of it.

Beck’s, the culprits that came up with fancy labels for their imported lager, promoted a very mundane kind of campaign in a few countries I can think of – most of the time involving choices and reminding everyone they’re the no. 1 German lager in the World. While we don’t know if this is true or not and while most don’t care about the fact that the best beer comes from Belgium (as some of my readers from Belgium will want to point out, obviously) they appeared to be quite a posh beer with a decent price compared to other stuff out there.

In the UK, I’ve not been given a bottle of anything as of late, more like a pint in a glass. But the Beck’s Canvas idea was more than generous with the artists that showcased their art on Beck’s bottles (Riitta Ikonen who created some herring costume and went for a dive in the Baltic Sea, Tom Price who does sculpture, Charlotte Bracegirdle who has curious paintings of people with no heads or hands, and Simon Cunningham).

Last time I got a bottle, I was very disappointed I didn’t get the one with the duck on it.

And now I realised – it had to have something to do with the Becksperience gigs going on this summer with Massive Attack, only to end with the Beck’s Fusions event in Manchester this weekend. The one in Bucharest was a hit by the way but halfway into the show all the regular Beck’s had been drank and no one dared touch the Green Lemon flavour. Oh, and to spoil it, Massive Attack have new tracks.