BLOG 05.20.13

Lor Gold joined Schawk, Inc. late last year as its Global Chief Creative Officer and immediately began sharing his passion for creativity and discipline in branding. He happily answered many questions for us; here’s one.

Q: How do you see packaging functioning today within these broader contexts – brand and media? What IS packaging today?

A: Nothing in marketing communications resides closer to the brand itself than packaging. The brand itself – all of its benefits, all of its innovation, its color, its shape, its promise – lives on the package. The amount of insight and design and copywriting and innovation that goes into the very thin line of a package’s substrate is staggering. It truly protects and defends the brand 24/7.

But rarely are the package design and the thought and the strategy and the care and the talent that went into it carried forward into other forms of brand marketing. I have never fully understood this. If the thinking that goes into packaging were carried forward, you could be assured of total creative integration. Somewhere along the line, agencies have convinced their clients that the actual brand itself is somehow different than a branded message about the brand itself.  I don’t buy it.