Bad packaging design - Coca-Cola

Packaging design is indeed a frightening beast in the world of design!

It doesn’t matter how much experience a design team has, or how much money you throw at a project, it seems every now and then even the greatest designers trip, stumble and fall face first into a blender….woops, maybe that was a tad graphic, sorry ;)

The latest example of bad packaging design comes from none other than mega-brand Coca-Cola who recently released their new ‘festive season’ can. What the heck were they thinking?

The new Coca-Cola festive can takes a bold step where no Coke can had gone before….all white.
Yes that’s right. Coca Cola ditched their iconic red in favour of an aluminium can that was wrapped completely in white. Talk about crazy!

Honestly I think the Coca-Cola marketing executives had their hearts in the right place – the design was not only festive, but also intended to raise awareness for polar bears amid the heightened concern of global warming and its impact on their natural environments. Coca-Cola has donated 3 million dollars to the World Wildlife Fund (nice one guys) in order to bolster conservation efforts for these beautiful animals. You will see the can is emblazoned with a family of cute polar bears that track across the bottom of the can.

Firstly you can barely see the bears against the white of the can and secondly the can itself looks extremely close to the Diet Coke can design.
In fact there have been many customers who have complained to store manager that they have no regular Coke, only to be shocked by the discovery of such a vastly ‘different’ design. There have been a few cases of customers going home and drinking regular coke, thinking it was diet, and getting rather vexed at the discovery only a few days later. As far as I know diabetics drink Diet Coke, imagine how annoyed you would be if you realised you had been guzzling down copious amounts of sugary-death!

Some people even complain that the Coke tastes different in a white can, this is obviously rubbish, but hey….it’s amazing what the mind can do and how much sway it holds over how we perceive taste.

Well, it’s not only Coca-Cola who created bad packaging design for cola cans in the past. Just take a look at Pepsi’s super-bad new can design and you will see just what ugly is. Their super simplistic new design totally destroys the fun, energetic, design of the past. Talk about clinical and totally uninspiring. When will people learn that logo design doesn’t have to be completely minimal to be effective? This is taking it a bit too far!

Bad packaging design is all around us and it is seriously interesting that it’s not only the inexperienced companies that are making ‘epic fails’ in the design department, but even the big boys with some the most iconic work of all time.

While this is a pretty nasty blunder for Coca-Cola it’s nowhere near as big a mess up as the time when they tried to change the actual recipe of the drink itself, haha….now that was a supreme FAIL!