Jerky is Jerky. Except When It’s Not.

April 30, 2009

All beef jerky is the same.

Go ahead. Ask anyone in the jerky industry. They’ll tell you so. It’s all just dry, salty meat. Nothing more, nothing less.

Jerky is jerky.

Knowing that, here’s a question. If you’re selling beef jerky, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition – especially when traditional marketing techniques are getting more and more tune-out-able? It’s no longer enough to advertise your way to the top, and how much social media can you employ to sell beef jerky?

To Joseph Duffy of Duffy & Partners, the answer is simple.

Take a hard look at design.

It’s the packaging in which your product is encased. It’s a brand experience. It’s sticking out from within a sea of normalcy, commanding attention not with flashiness but with sophistication. It’s not just grabbing the eye, but respecting it as well.

Duffy showed up to an AIGA event in dusty little Sioux Falls yesterday with a simple message: respect design and understand its growing influence. And as the architect behind several of the world’s most notable brand makeovers, he had the goods to back up his message.

Essentially, the grocery store aisle is a new form of media. We can skip ads, we can stop reading print and we can ignore circumstantial marketing. But, when faced with a vast wall of choice, we can’t ignore our eyes. Promotion helps, but when you stand face to face with 35 different types of soda, it’s the packaging that gets the final say.

Duffy & Partners believes in design that’s sustainable. It should last for years. Decades, even. It should provide an experience. It should be colloquial – you should find something interesting to pass on, to talk about, to Twitter or blog about, to want to buy if only to show your friends how awesome it is.

Not all change is good. When Tropicana’s look went from recognizable to passable, there was outrage. Not because it was awful, but because it wasn’t anything special. It didn’t stand out. It wasn’t true to the brand. (They’ve since changed it back.)

In other words – it turns out packaging is a pretty big deal.

Whether it’s refreshing the look of Fresca or reminding people of the fun they could be having in the Bahamas, making Wolfgang Puck look consistent and uniform or convincing men they should buy Aveda products, in every case it came down to what the package looked like.

It even happens here in Sioux Falls - our humble little agency has spent the past several years making sure The Gas Stop stands out from the teeming fields of gas stations that dot the landscape.

It all has one thing in common: it stands out from the rest.

Because when it comes down to it, jerky is just jerky.

That is, of course, unless it’s packaged as something else.

By Corey

Filed Under Advertising, Marketing, Design, The Process

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