Glass Coke Bottles example essay topic

Assorted canned beverages (various manufacturers) by Paul Lukas Beverage marketers have long recognized the value of a proprietary bottle shape when forging a brand's identity. Coca-Cola's familiar contour glass bottle, the classic case in point, has become so synonymous with the brand that its communicative oomph rivals that of the product's script lettering. But how does a company maintain that sense of package-driven equity when selling its product in aluminum cans, which don't lend themselves to unique shapes? The answer for a growing number of beverage marketers is simple: Feature an illustration of the bottle on the can. The unusual thrust of this approach - depicting one packaging format on another packaging format - is appealing from a marketing standpoint because it boils down a package design to pure image, pure signifier, essentially transforming the entire package into a logotype.

The idea appears to have first hit the American beverage market in 1993, when Coke began depicting its contour glass bottle on 12-ounce cans. The company went further in 1997, when it began featuring the bottle illustration on two-liter plastic bottles and on the cardboard soda cups used at many movie theaters and fast food outlets. So does a consumer drinking a can of Coke really connect more fully with the product if the can features an illustration of a glass bottle? Coke spokesman Bob Bertini thinks so.

'The contour bottle captures the essence of the brand,' he explains. 'It's a shorthand symbol for the brand experience. When people see the bottle, they immediately associate it with Coca-Cola. ' No argument there. But while the glass bottle is clearly a cultural icon (and also appears to be the format of choice for those animated polar bears in Coke commercials), it represents only a smidgen of the brand's American sales nowadays, which means Coke has managed the neat trick of anchoring its visual image to a packaging format that few people actually buy, and that the brand's younger customers may never even have experienced first-hand. It's not hard to envision a future marketplace, perhaps 50 years hence, in which glass Coke bottles have been phased out completely but are still being depicted on some new packaging format that we can't even imagine yet.

The market situation is somewhat different with Orangina, the citrus drink that debuted in France in 1936 and came to America in the early 1980's. The brand's short, squat 10-ounce glass bottle - known in the trade as 'the bul by bottle,' because it resembles a light bulb - hit the American market around 1985 and remains the product's most popular packaging format. With bottle sales running strong, the brand's marketing team decided to put an illustration of the bottle on Orangina cans in 1995. 'We needed to communicate that message of premium ness on the 12-ounce can,' says Orangina marketing executive Raja Kort. 'We found that the image of the bul by bottle does that job, because it takes the concept and image of the product and transfers it to the package. ' Kort's mention of 'premium ness's peaks to a key element of the bottle / can schism: Glass bottles just look classier than cans.

Anheuser-Busch marketer David English says this factored heavily in the brewery's decision to begin depicting Michelob's trademarked bottle shape on the product's can design in 1996. 'The bottle goes a long way toward reinforcing the brand's super-premium image,' he explains. 'People instantly recognize it as an upscale package, so we thought we should make it part of our can package. ' The move was deemed so successful that A-B then created version of the can design, in which the bottle shape and the Michelob logo are embossed on the can's surface. The embossed Michelob can may be the latest step toward a development that beverage marketers have long been awaiting: the shaped can. Industry observers had anticipated that proprietary can shapes would be here by now, but the technology has lagged.

Coke test-marketed a clumsy-looking contour shaped can in 1997, but despite some enthusiastic initial reports (including claims that some consumers actually thought the can improved the product's taste), the project was quietly shelved, with no plans to revive it. So, for now, the only way for beverage manufacturers to transfer their bottle shapes to the cans is via illustrations, which presents some interesting possibilities. Maybe that as-yet-undeveloped Coke package of the future, instead of just carrying an image of the glass bottle, will feature a picture of the can with the picture of the bottle. Or a picture of a plastic bottle with a picture of a can with a picture of a glass bottle - the possibilities for nested imagery are endless. All of which will no doubt be very confusing for the polar bears.