Not-So-National Brands

For the 2004 holiday season, Coca-Cola added Target's mascot to retro packaging for Coke Classic, a gift that earned the brand multiple endcaps and upfront displays (see picture).It's certainly not uncommon for a national brand to develop exclusive packaging graphics for leading mass-merchant or club-store accounts. Retailers in those channels typically require unique packaging configurations or product assortments anyway, so additional changes to the creative design don't drive up costs much further.But Coke isn't taking such extra steps just for its largest accounts. Last spring, it "retailored" a national Major League Baseball program for regional grocer ShopRite by putting the chain's logo on promotional 12-packs (see picture). Coke isn't alone. In 2003, Kraft Foods hosted an exclusive sweepstakes for Meijer that put the winner alongside soccer star Mia Hamm on exclusive packaging for the Midwestern mass merchant. Last spring, General Mills honored the Saugus (Mass.) American Little League Team -- winners of nothing more than the New England championship -- with a commemorative box of Cheerios distributed exclusively through Shaw's Supermarkets.In fact, retailers now are expecting special packaging almost as often as account-specific product displays or special product assortments, according to results from the P-O-P Trends Survey published in this issue. With declining technology costs making "mass customization" more feasible, and with retailers increasingly searching for competitive differentiation, leading brands are willing to tweak graphics to generate better placement within stores.Everyone is prepared to do it for Wal-Mart, of course. Duracell helped the nation's largest retailer push its online music service during the holidays with packaging that offered free downloads (see picture).But even small, seemingly peripheral accounts, such as H-E-B's Central Market, are increasingly earning special attention. Although the Texas chain currently numbers only seven stores, it has developed a strong reputation as a unique purveyor of specialty foods -- in part because it often eschews national brands. That led Lone Star neighbor Dr Pepper/Seven Up to agree to resurrect its original Dr Pepper formula exclusively for those seven stores. Central Market gave the brand pallet placement on the perimeter (see picture).