Kettle Chips—a product identity perspective

Charla and I love Kettle Chips—they are an indulgent pre-dinner snack we occasionally treat ourselves to when a long week in the city has pummeled us into submission. Once opened, the whole contents of a large bag invariably disappears within ten crunchy minutes.

Kettle have been the leading premium potato crisp brand in the UK for some years now, but they haven't rested on their laurels one bit: they are always coming out with some new flavour, complete with evocative title and expressively-designed wrapper. The flavours are usually delicious, and when they are less than that, improved versions are often forthcoming pretty quickly. Kettle Chips also strike a friendly yet respectful tone in encouraging customer feedback—I get the strong impression that the company is run by people who are genuinely passionate about creating amazing crisps.

So what's not to like? Well, nothing at all, but I do have a hopeful observation about Kettle's product identity and branding to offer them.

While the titles and wrappers of each flavour are boldly differentiated from one another, the flavours themselves are far less so—while each tastes great, it does so in a way that is far more similar to the other flavours than it is different.

The pack of the Mango Chilli flavour, "Angry Fruit" (pictured above), proclaims: "the chilli takes time to arrive, but when it does you'll know!" Well, not really—the chilli is really very mild. There is a mismatch, a disjunction, between the pack's promise of a wild and challenging tastebud adventure and the actual soothingly familiar and pleasant crisp experience of perfectly crunchy, salt-savoury-with-just-a-hint-of-something-exotic munching. It's a bit like searching for a barely-perceptible note of cinnamon or aniseed in a delectable high-class dark chocolate ganache that is far too refined to shout out its differences from the others in the box.

Kettle, be bold—have the courage of your branding convictions and give us chillies that burn, limes that bite, and mangos that sweeten us! Let the identity of your crisps, so brilliantly captured by your marketing department, shine through the humble potato itself. Take us on the daring crispy escapades you promise us, and you will have (at least two) loyal customers for life.

Not-so-not-so-green Apple?

This news is a few days old now, but I wanted to update readers further to my "not-so-green Apple" post: Steve Jobs has blogged positively about Apple's environmental footprint, current and future, and Greenpeace have given him a qualified thumbs up. There is some intelligent commentary from Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm.

Fair Tracing: product identity transparency

The New Scientist reports on the Fair Tracing project:

Proving food's ethical origins

You know the price of a jar of fair-trade coffee before you reach the checkout, but how can you be sure of its ethical cost? Now techniques are being developed to tag goods with information about their entire production history, to reassure consumers that what they are buying has genuinely been ethically made.

The Fair Tracing project was established by a UK team including Ann Light at Sheffield Hallam University. "When consumers buy something they want to know: is this really part of a fair process? Is it really organic, as it claims?" says Light.

The researchers are exploring techniques to store information in barcodes, to be read by consumers using hand-held readers such as camera phones. Products would be tagged when they are made and further information added at each point in the production process, for example, how much the item cost the trader and how much it was sold on for. "You could work out whether the traders along the chain have been paying their workers a decent wage by looking at the profits they are reporting," says Light. "It's an attempt to use technology to give a voice to people who are being exploited and otherwise wouldn't be heard."

Light and her colleagues have already begun working with coffee growers in southern India and vineyards in Santiago, Chile, with positive responses. "We've been explaining the benefits to ethical traders of giving out this information," says Light. "They can get credit from consumers for their good practices."

This sounds like an amazingly powerful way to make the rich identity of a product—including the economics of the supply chain, and the stories of the people in that chain—transparent to the customer. This is something I have looked forward to for some years now. Yay!

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

Found via Andy Sack:

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

I don't think this was the response intended by the blogger of these images, but I really don't know which one is more repellent to me. So there is at least some kind of branding consistency across the two, from my perspective. ; )

Shopping 2.0

I couldn't resist passing on this quirky video (via Ivan), even though the in-crowd "web 2.0" references will be lost on my non-geek readers. The concept of free-tagging supermarket products with keywords and phrases chimes nicely with the concerns of my previous posts on product identity.

Carbon footprint labels scheme

BBC News reports:

A labelling scheme that will show customers the size of a product's "carbon footprint" has been unveiled.

The initiative, operated by the Carbon Trust, will show shoppers how much carbon was emitted in the manufacture and transportation of the goods.

Participating companies also have to agree to cut the product's carbon footprint over a two-year period or face being thrown out of the scheme.

It will be interesting to see how detailed the label information is—and whether it breaks down shipping carbon costs into its inter- and (much larger) intra-national elements. (There's no indication that it will do so on the relevant Carbon Trust page here.)

On a related note, Jamais Cascio points out the need for carbon labels to not only show the carbon cost of the product but also a guideline "recommended" figure:

[N]ow the Carbon Trust, a UK non-profit that works with businesses to reduce their greenhouse impacts, has embarked on an effort to build a labeling standard for adoption across industries. (It should come as no surprise that I'm very much in favor of this sort of labeling!)

So let's say this works out, and soon every bag of crisps you buy has a little label on it showing how many grams of carbon resulted from that bag's production. Now you can compare it to other snacks, and try to eat only the goodies with smaller numbers in the label. But while that level of comparison is helpful, it doesn't offer the larger context necessary to make the comparison meaningful. You still don't know whether both the (e.g.) 100g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of crisps and the (e.g.) 50g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of carrots are outrageously high, ridiculously low, or vanishingly irrelevant.

Giving purchasers a more contextual sense of product carbon cost may actually be an area that is ripe for disintermediation of the retailers by social web services—if I could scan a product's barcode with my phone camera and then view it's carbon cost in relation to other equivalent products (via a web service), I could readily get a sense of its carbon cost in its relevant context.

Product identity

Seamus blogs about the conversation on "product identity" he, Jamie Wallace, Ajit Jaokar and myself had at Monday's Identity Society launch event:

This morning at the Identity Society inaugural unconference conversation ranged over a number of issues, but for me the most interesting was a discussion about product identity.

One of the concerns I've raised in the past has been with supermarkets labelling products according to whatever arbitrary system they happen to think people are worried about this week. Recently the chimera has been air miles, the distance food has flown to get to the shelves - a convenient straw man, as I argue here, to avoid the real issues of the road miles that contribute almost all of the carbon footprint of our food.

At today's event we discussed the possibility of products, as well as people, having verifiable identities - not just labels that retailers could tailor to their marketing needs or the fashionable concern of the moment but independently verifiable product idents that tell consumers where those products had come from, how they had been produced and perhaps other data such as the product/supplier's Ethiscore. The point being, of course, that different people are concerned about different things and will want different information about the same product, not a one-size-fits-all label that tells them a single irrelevant stat about how many miles their haddock spent on a plane.



Japan seems to be some way to solving this problem already with QR codes - a customisable consumer-readable barcode that Japanese mobile phones are being modified to scan and interpret (Adverlab).

RFID chips and other tracking tools may be the long-term solution for user-controlled logistical planning, but it's heartening to see that the requirement we identified in a half-hour brainstorm for a consumer-readable product idents/details is already a solved problem just waiting to make its way here. Complex information tags that can be read by a mobile phone open the door to all sorts of possibilities, not just limited to the quantity of data that can be stored in the tag. Once products can be readily identified by any consumer with a mobile phone the mobile web comes into its own. Not every purchaser has to carry out their own investigative journalism to find out whether a given product meets their own standards of (say) price, environmental impact and ethical production. They just need access to a reliable source of that research while they shop.

Interesting that Seamus mentions the Japanese barcode-reading phones angle, as that popped in and out of my head too during the conversation but I forgot to mention it! The Japanese are way ahead of pretty much all countries except South Korea with mobile tech, and this is a good example of their sophistication.

Once people can easily and quickly use their mobiles to hop from the product on any retailer's shelf (ubiquity is clearly key here) to third-party information resources (e.g. a product information wiki), things could get very interesting indeed in the field of product identity.

Another possibility is that retailers may just feel incentivised to begin to open up their own product information databases for remixing by these third-party resources, should they gather enough steam.

After all, competition is competition, whether the beans are costed in cash or carbon.

Green muddle

The BBC reports a new study's conclusion that "Ethical shoppers 'need more help":

"Consumers find that being green or ethical is a very hard, time consuming, and emotional experience," he said.

The greenest of all shoppers do a lot of research before buying anything - but often feel unsatisfied at their purchases as they invariably have compromised some of their values.

How to have our shopping experience effortlessly adapt to our identity—including our green concerns? This is one of the biggest questions on the planet right now, it seems to me.

[UPDATE: added missing blockquote indent!]