The Fine Art of Marketing Lowbrow

Whatever happened to the “house” brand in grocery stores? Have the “design culture” creeps actually done away with it? Because if it’s still there, I sure can’t spot it. Everything is so “pretty” now in the grocery aisle.

I remember you could always spot it on the shelf immediately because the packaging was so (intentionally) lame and clunky that it became the brand identity. If it was cheezy-looking, that meant it was the cheapest product. When I was young and first learning how to shop for groceries, that was how it was done. You could go through the store and simply pick up the lamest-looking package and save an enormous amount of money. Part of the house brand strategy was to make the labeling look like they weren’t “wasting” your precious grocery money on elaborate (i.e., expensive) packaging. It all just got tossed out anyway, right?

The ultimate end point of this game was the “generic” packaging craze of the 1970s. I remember the beer cans that were totally white with just the word “Beer” on it (I think it was in ‘Sparta’ or ‘Rockwell’—a big slab serif “Egyptian” typeface).

Now THAT was packaging at its modernist finest! It was elegant and cheap—and totally utterly lame.

The product in the package was usually the same brand sitting on the shelf next to the generic, in a different wrapper. The typical ploy was to purchase in bulk a locally made (a.k.a. cheaper) product and simply place it in your own packaging. In our local stores the generic beer was Lucky Lager beer, a locally brewed cheapo brand that was actually our circle’s favorite kegger beer anyway. We could tell it was the same because Lucky Lager brand had little rebus puzzles under the bottle caps back then, and we used to sit around the party house and try to figure them out. We tried to collect the whole set (they were numbered). The generic bottled beer had them as well.

This is an old marketing technique. All of those really awful-looking Publisher’s Clearing House packets are ugly intentionally. All of the graphic designers I’ve ever met wince when I bring them up in conversation. You see, most graphic design is taught in “art schools” as a bastard child, unloved and unwanted and often ridiculed by the faculty. In art departments, the emphasis is on beauty; they talk about it constantly, really shove it down your throats. Almost all graphic designers I’ve ever met will state up front that their purpose in life is to make the world “more beautiful.”

So, when they think of those Publisher’s Clearing House mailers, they get angry and offended by them. They always say something like “Oh, I wish they would DO SOMETHING about them!” as if they were an insult to the design profession.

The truth of those mailers (like the “house” brand) is that they have studied it very carefully. Few things in the advertising world have been studied as intensely as direct mail. Those ugly packages WORK.

At one point, the PCH folks decided to “improve” the design and “appearance” of the mailer. They even hired a big-shot design studio to do it. They cleaned it up and made it look real pretty. These prettified packets were mailed out and the response DROPPED dramatically. It was a disaster. The next year, they went back to the old ugly look. Sales were suddenly better than ever. Lesson learned.

Some folks may argue that we’ve been conditioned by PCH folks to recognize the ugly package and therefore have a Pavlovian response to it. Perhaps, but I think it goes a little deeper than that. I think we have been trained by generations of products made to look “cheap” by using lame graphics as an identifier. It’s become a marketing art of the highest and most sophisticated order.

All those “good taste”-driven graphic design “decorators” out there, take note. This is a really big lesson to absorb. Sometimes “pretty” and “ugly” are just tools. Like blue vs. yellow, or square vs. round, they are just tools to use to communicate with the viewer.