Give Good Ideas a Shot

We're fickle, demanding, and, at least when it comes to satisfying our shopping lists, unsettled. Even after distilling our items from a long line of ambiguous other in the supermarket, we still debate, question, and reevaluate one brand of milk compared to the next. In resolve, between a local home brand wrapped behind white anonymity and its renowned competitor, we instinctively navigate toward the sprightlier packaging, one that celebrates branding- in the wake of reassuring ourselves that we've also made an honest choice. (Representative: Greenfields.)

The same goes to selecting our liquor. Apropos of cinching this year's Best Packaging Award for Best Show, the Dieline Awards- an honorary to the world's best design packaging- has crowned a maritime-themed cocktail bar in Barcelona (Bar Pesca Salada) for its innovative bottle design: Fittingly, a visual game of a man rollicking in its spirit. Swerving away from typical shelf bottles advertising the same supreme age, its minimal brand advertising is, in this case, a refreshing sight for sore eyes when you're shopping in a place usually amassed with logos bordering offensive.

However, between you and your shot glasses, drinking is a serious affair; something not to be trifled with in the stuff's fervor. To feel reassured, we often put our money where the stamp is: In a distinctive approval from the product's heritage where no second tier ingredient can emulate. (It's not unlikely that competitors taste better, it's just that the former already looks better in taste.)
Unless, of course, everyone else promises the same damn thing.

In marketing speak, that could be brand saturation. (Hoorah!) In a consumer's mind, that's as tasting as water with a homogenous appeal (or a lack thereof, for that matter) that renders one brand from the next indistinguishable. And should everything taste as its packaging does, saturating its design packaging is equivalent to a sameness, a predictability: The same robust taste, or the same spicy notes tinkled with a needling pine flavor. Judging by how convenient and common it is to mark brand heritage across all liquor bottles, we wouldn't bother with brand packaging, in other words.

Winning a design packaging award for an illustrative definition of canoodling may, therefore, be a novel idea. But toying with it while you down the slow-burning taste of gin only makes it better, because the activity is never to be a dull one. It's a wayward impulse that should not chaste us to any old hand, like giving fresh ideas a shot (I mean it quite literally), or drinking it straight from the bottle like a sinkhole.