A Cluetrain Manifesto for packaging?

We all have read and absorbed the Cluetrain Manifesto, or at least some article about it, or some blog post, or some 140 characters tweet!

In my opinion food brands should re-read it thinking about how packaging is approached. I think there’s a huge margin of improvement in being open, sincere and trustworthy in this field.

A small example is this case: Danish biscuit brands in a Carrefour market.

These are two different boxes; none of them is high quality product, but the “Danesita” is the “self-defined medium quality brand” and the “1” brand is the Carrefour private label discount brand.

The problem is when you turn upside down the box and read the ingredients. The company is the same, a Portuguese industry, the ingredients are perfectly identical except for butter, which is 12% in Danesita and 7% in “1”.

Conclusion: the two packages could be (and would have been more honest) a perfectly identical blue box, like this

In few words, in packaging there’s still wide room for dismissing fake images, false promises, boasted ingredients or retouched photos. This would align the packaging design world with the rest of communication channels, which is living an unstoppable change in that direction.

There’s room for another topic, but not in this post: homologation of offer in the “competition oriented” liberal world.