Luke's advertising class Research: Schweppes summer rewind bottle design

Bit of a lengthy title for this blog post which is detailing all about the effectiveness and non effective elements of a Schweppes bottle featuring the logo of their summer rewind promotion. Now just based off the previous advertising campaigns Schweppes has always tried to adopt a refined mature sense of imagery with their products. This has often resulted in retro designs ranging from the kind of graphics you would expect to see in the late fifties as the following image can attest towards.

This retro style and aesthetic has been carried out to different degrees ranging from the bottles themselves to the graphics printed on the labels.

Schweppes has also taken on the motif of bubbles and has it ingrained into the physical bottle of all of their plastic bottles while glass bottles feature the bubbles motif as part of their graphic, interestingly enough the graphic is reversed on plastic bottles, where the bubbles have been integrated into the bottle but the graphic on the labels feature glass bottles as prominent pieces of art.

An image of the bubbles motif Schweppes uses in the design of their plastic bottle

When it comes to colours Schweppes find themselves in a position where their free to use a wide range of deep colours though their range, and each colour has been matched appropriately to the flavour.

So while this is all well and good how does the current bottle I have in my hands compare with a mainstream market, weighing in it's pros and cons? Well for starters an a few images to give an idea of the product. (I don't have a camera available at the moment)

This is the bottle that I have in my hands -

And this is the logo that they've added along the top of the label of the bottle with a blue colouring scheme that is featured across the entire range of Schweppes products from lemonade to Pepsi, to solo, to mountain dew, etc.

The particular gimmick of this promotion is that when you collect enough points from drinking Schweppes products, you can send away your codes and points and get a shirt, which is a simple enough gimmick although it does lack a bit of the grand prize feel of a lot of other promotional offers however there isn't an element of chance to this promotion aside from their total stock.

Breaking down the design of this bottle and it's corresponding label yields a mixed bag of pros and cons.

Pros:

1. The blue and orange stick out to an extent that the gimmick stands out amongst the other bottles that its next to on the shelf.

2. There is no chance with the gimmick so if you buy the product a certain amount of times you will get the item you desire, if you do indeed desire the item in question.

3. The bottle itself is well designed, recyclable and suitable for mass production and consumption in a way that is favourable to a super markets way of stacking product.

4. The print across the bottle harkens back to the older days of glass bottles and helps to re-iterate the retro feel that Schweppes endorses.

Cons

1. The retro look of the glass printing gets cut off abruptly at the bottom of the bottle.

2. The gimmick doesn't have the same sense of reward as other competitions with a big pay out.

3. It harkens back to two different time periods with the gimmick of the faded shirts being a fashion from the eighties while the bottle aesthetic has roots in the fifties.

4. The scratching aesthetic that they've added to the logo gives it a degraded look that once again seems at odds with the graphics normally associated with the brand.

 Whether or not there are more pros and cons for this design could be debated, as this particular design has gone through several iterations to where it is now, but this current design does have its issues. But can anything ever really have a perfect design? Perhaps we'll find out later, perhaps not, either way it'll be interesting to see what comes of this in future iterations of the ideas Schweppes has carried throughout the years.

~ Fin