DESIGNING A LABEL FOR A PRODUCT

A product is not ready to be sold unless it is packed and labeled. A well packed product is well contained, can be stored and transported easily and can be identified anywhere. The label on the packaging serves to inform and educate the customers. It tells the customers what the product is, the quantity contained in the pack, what it is made of and in what proportions are the ingredients present, the ways to use it, the time within which it has to be used, the price to be paid, the expected and the unexpected side-effects of using it and also how to store it. But more importantly, it is the label on the pack that attracts the customers. Companies are now spending enormous amounts of money in designing the labels so that the products not only stand out on the shelves but also attract the right clientele. They are getting the services of reknowned artists to design the labels.

The extract from the New York Times of June 11 2008 given below proves the point.

Clockwise from top left: Wine labels designed by artists Liam Gillick, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Lambie and Anna Gaskell on recent vintages by Betts & Scholl.

Anyone who stumbled their way across MoMA’s lobby in the last couple of months has trampled over an explosive arrangement of multicolored stripes on the floor by the Scottish artist Jim Lambie. The experience is a full frontal assault on a viewer’s sense of balance — akin to guzzling a bottle of fine Shiraz. Aficionados interested in all of the above can buy a $79 bottle of Betts & Scholl’s 2006 vintage of Black Betty Shiraz, which features a red-and-black inkblot label designed by Jim Lambie.

With Black Betty, the sommelier Richard Betts (of The Little Nell in Aspen), and Miami Beach art collector Dennis Scholl (whose collection is on view at World Class Boxing in Miami) follow Château Mouton Rothschild’s tradition of art-wine collaborations. Betts hunts down the quality vines and Scholl procures artists to design the labels. The company has released a total of seven vintages since 2003, featuring the work of established contemporary artists such as Anna Gaskell and Liam Gillick, as well as Raymond Pettibon, a painter who once inked album covers for the punk band Black Flag. “The wine world is so staid and serious,” says Scholl, of the outré labels. “We’re like, ‘It’s wine — c’mon, it’s fun!’” Not that Betts & Scholl aren’t serious about their business: all seven wines have landed scores of 90 or higher from Wine Spectator.

On Thursday, Betts & Scholl will announce the release of its first ever distilled liquor: a mezcal called Sombra, that will be accompanied by one of the industry’s most unorthodox pieces of label art yet. The image, produced by an Aspen-based art collective, is an abstraction of a Mexican soft-core comic — a figure that Scholl merrily explains, “looks like turtles humping.” Safe to say that it’s not the sort of illustration that will ever grace a bottle of Mouton.

Source: http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/wine-time-artist-jim-lambie-gets-labeled/

Contributed By:

Prof. P. Guha

(Globsyn Business School)