Tuesday 14th – Museum of brands day 1
This was the first week back after a long spring break which began after the blink industries project. Today we visited the museum of brands, a museum founded by Robert Opie meant to archive products and items to show how they have evolved and changed over the decades. Today’s workshops were about “Brand evolution” and “customer profiling.” In the Brand evolution workshop we discussed why a brand would change and redesign it’s logos and packaging, going down to one of the exhibits and my group seeing the evolution of the Tate and Lyle sugar brand starting off simple and a little whimsical before evolving and slowly changing to fit each time period. Our task for this workshop was to redesign a brand’s logo for what it could look like in 100 or so years.
The second workshop was on customer profiling where we were given an item and had to observe what it was, who it is likely made for and to create a customer that would buy this item.
Wednesday 15th – Museum of brands day 2
Today’s workshops were on “Gender in advertising” and “Sustainability in packaging.”
The first workshop was on customer profiling where we observed how companies advertise to a specific market and demographic, such as for young women it would be flowery and soothing while for men it would be all grey and somewhat intimidating. We then went into depth on certain ads such as a women’s hair shampoo ad and seeing how they portray their models, specific clothing, hair style and figured out these products are meant to say to you “buy our shampoo and your hair will look like this” when in reality, it won’t actually give those results, it is just a means of trying to convince you to buy the product.
While for men it’s about how shaving your chest hair can give you an advantage on the sports field which seems to be both extremely specific, targeting sporty men, and a little wrong as shaving chest hair has nothing to do with your performance. But from this workshop we learnt how companies will advertise to a specific gender.
The second workshop was sustainability in packaging where we identified packaging, how it can be recycled or disposed of and whether they are fully environmentally friendly. We were tasked with picking an item and see how we could make more environmentally friendly and easier to recycle. The box Anika and I picked was made of card, laminated presumably with plastic, uses a magnet as a latch and printed with Gold ink on certain parts. We discussed on how the instead of plastic lamination it could be a varnish which is made out of natural oils, remove the gold ink in favour of just regular print ink and have the latch be a paper latch.