Selling the COPY luwak

Kohi Sen Sen Oh, which means Thousand years coffee, is a rare coffee bean found in Samcheok; the eastern coast of South-Korea. This place has the perfect circumstance for the Emperor Tamari, a unique specie of the Korean-chimp family, which need a lot of sweet-salaya leaves and specific raspberry to live. You might heard about the already infamous Kopi Luwak, a paradoxurus, whose faeces are used to brew the world most expensive coffee. The Kohi Sen Sen Noh is made a different way. Emperor Tamari's which rarely found around the coast, has a unique ability to produce a particular sweet saliva/spit which covers mini size peabean(these has been imported by early Japanese farmers) with a thin layer of sticky yet sweet spit. It's been told many years after many years that this composite makes your skin soft and white as silk or what they called "Thousand years younger" . The local citizen of Samcheok named this bean after the story

I, as curator of Coffee packages and stories, have been lucky to get a small 50 pounds for quite a low price. I would like to share this drinking experience with my fellow bloggers or faithful readers.

What you just read was bullshit. Coffee is actually shit, but with stories like these it became something eyeteasing, something we long for and wish to see it in a good way, which is actually 'controlled' by nowadays marketing.

Again, Power lies in the lifestyle of coffee, not the amount of caffeine

Old coffee in clever jackets

An article about lifestyle and coffee by curator Wilsun Cheung.

"Lifestyle & Design
Lifestyle is een bordspel uit het jaar 1989 maar tegelijkertijd ook een moeilijk uit te leggen term vanwege de veelzijdige betekenis ervan. Het is een woord dat veel potentiele waarde bezit, vooral in de marketing. Een directe vertaling ervan wordt al gebruikt in de marketing: de kenmerkende manier van leven van een individu, groep of subcultuur. Het begrip lifestyle wordt enigszins aangenomen als een marketing term dat de consumentengedrag omschrijft, maar daarentegen is er ook een omgekeerde beweging waarbij consumenten een bepaalde leefwijze aannemen om te integreren in een bepaalde groep. In dit geval hangt het begrip samen met de term imago.

Als we nu dieper gaan graven naar de echte betekenis van lifestyle vinden we heel wat anders. Overal om ons heen zien we interieur winkels die iets met ‘Lifestyle’ in de naam hebben. Zij positioneren zichzelf als de verkopers van “geluk”, met slogans als “Life is beautiful and we show it”. Het is dus iets goeds als je daar iets koopt en je zou je dan ook beter moeten voelen. Ze willen dat je het beste van alle mogelijke werelden leeft.

Het begrip lifestyle kan dus worden beschouwd als een soort optimistisch geloof: Het geloven in een goede afloop. Buiten dat heeft lifestyle invloed op de reflectie van het zelfbeeld van mensen: de manier waarop zichzelf zien en denken hoe anderen hen zien. Het is een composiet van motivatie, verlangens en het hopen op een goede afloop.

Als we nou eens de lifestyle gaan omschrijven van koffieverpakkingen ontdekken we iets merkwaardigs. Men gaat in het product geloven vanwege het goede gevoel en verlangen dat de lifestyle met zich meebrengt. Pak een beet de Stumptown koffie verpakking; deze verpakkingen gemaakt van gerecycled papier en frivole verhaaltjes op kaartjes over fair trade geeft de consument een ander smaak en denken. Je zou zo kunnen zeggen dat mensen wakker kunnen worden van cafeïne vrije koffie in een goede verpakking. Een ander voorbeeld: Skinny fat burning coffee, je verbrand vet door koffie te drinken? hoezo? omdat het een fris en slanke verpakking heeft?

Tenslotte moeten we niet de bekende donker bruin- rode kleur van koffieverpakkingen vergeten. In de kleurenleer van marketing staat rood voor energie, actie, enthousiasme en kracht. Precies de prikkels die de koffie moet communiceren. De kracht zit niet in de koffie maar in het geloof van de koffie en het verlangen ernaar.
Lifestyle is marketing en ja het verkoopt.

Wilson Cheung, Old Coffee in Clever Jackets"

Wishcasting Coffee Package

Buying coffee is just as normal as lighting up a cigarette or sipping a glass of redwine. It is not the healthiest thing yet the strangest. It's normal. No actually it's not normal, but with a total package of lifestyle and believers it has become quite normal. Coffee is bitter and darkbrown/black, why is it delicious, fresh, sweet, it is fat reducing, or it makes you happy. At least that is what coffee producers claim. Also the visuals on the package; Why do they sell animals, tree's or other things on the package cover? For me I think coffee is similar to shit, but sold in clever jackets.

I used to got strucked by the phenomenon of the thought that buying coffee is a deadnormal and everyday business. Nowadays supermarkets offers a great variety of packages showing different colors, prints and promises allowing you to choose. As I mention before, making choices, or more specific: choosing which coffee you add to the cart, is a choice of lifestyle. Lifestyle is nothing more than choices we make everyday. The contemporary society offers us million choices to make in our lives such as work, school, sports, favorite food, favorite tv programma etc.

Standing in front of a great amount of different colors, shapes, names and text such as 'eight o'clock coffee time', I am talking about the coffee department at your local supermarket, confronts you to choose whether buy 'shit' or not.

Selling Colors - Brown, Orange and Yellow/Gold

The most obvious color of coffee are not the most founded packages in stores. In England yellow is associated with ‘Caution’ because it is the second light on stoplights (referring:http://wishcastingsjoerd.blogspot.com) Could this stop consumers of taking the pack off the shell? In America yellow is associated with 'Aging', like yellowed paper. It is true that drinking coffee makes you less more attractive (I am talking about yellow teeth and bad breath) Both yellow and brown aren't the most fresh and colors, like red, blue and white.

Selling Colors - Black and White

The most likely found coffee packages on the internet are white and black. Black and white (/gray) have an unlimited lifespan because these are timeless colors. White(/gray) is a delightful color and can be assumed as clean. Black packages uses a lot of graphic visuals, specific typography and abstract white-line drawings. It has a lower producing cost since black and white packages has less more color and are a less complicated. At the same time it is also easy to combine a little of an other color to increase the perceived value, like a touch of gold.

Selling - More Red

Selling Colors - Blue

Blue is a color most of the time referring to the air and water. Like these elements it is supposed to be feeling fresh and free. In the world of coffee packaging the fresh light-blue doesn't appeal much. Coffee brand Intelligentsia use this visual color translation of fresh blue to communicate it's decaffeinated coffee. In the print you can notice the use of 'Freedom' displaying flying across the water and the sea.

On the other hand, violet-blue have been more used for the upperclass market. It is obvious that the French roast coffee is mostly more exclusive and expensive. This distinguished packaging color is a obvious choice of communicating luxe and exclusivism. Brands such as Milano, Tchibo Exclusive, Blue mountain are clever to target the upperclass drinkers with this feeling with their elegant over-decorated packaging.

The color blue also has a certain story. Artist Pharrell Williams associate the color with the music genre: The Blues. The chord progressions and the nature of the chords of the Blues give this sad and sorrow feeling, he said. In other words 'Feeling blue'. (reference:http://wishcastmaloustrikwerda.blogspot.com)

Coffee is not the sweetest drink. The more expensive, the more bitter the taste get. In the same context as 'feeling blue', the luxurious blue turns into a sad and sorrow experience of drinking bitter coffee from the blue package.

Selling Colors - Red

Color is one of the elements that will set your business apart from others and your packaging colors will set your product apart from your competitors' products. The colors you choose should send the right subliminal messages to inspire any potential customer to buy your product.

In color psychology, red means energy, action, passion, excitement and strength.

Using red for your packaging colors draws attention to your product, stimulates the senses and excites the potential purchaser.

Dark reds are perceived as professional and luxurious, while bright reds are more exciting and energetic and generally of lower perceived value than dark reds. Adding gold or silver for the printing or decoration increases the perceived value.

Blue-reds are more attractive to the upper class market, while orange reds are attractive to the working class - orange reds have a lower perceived price and value.

Adding black decoration to your red packaging can add sexual or adult connotations.

Selling the energy

Thinkgeek.com provides a eco-friendly concept for smart masses. Nowadays using coffee packaging as concept to sell outdated products is quite popular. Not only people get energy from coffee but the iPod as well. This cup might be as 'hot' as a regular cappuccino at the local coffee store, Literally and/or figurative. Using the concept of a coffee cup, people have shown more interest in actually buying unpopular things as car-chargers.

Selling the kaffepåse

Duodji, is a centuries old Sami(North-Swedish) handicraft, that dates back to a time when the Sami were far more isolated from the outside world than they are today. Duodji tools and clothing material served their purpose to be functional and useful, however this does not mean that the Sami handicraft is unartistic. Sami duodji artists are able to bring function and art together in such a delicate way to create works of art in their own right. This is a coffee bag made out of leather and roots. The leather ware might be an eye candy for vintage junkies, who wants to be associated with Swedish folklore culture. This is also the 'Selling the stories' thing.

Selling the facts

This is a cost friendly concept for Stumptown Coffee by Packaging designer Fritz Mesenbrink. The Stumptown Coffee package includes slits for color coded cards that contained information about the coffee blend, grower information and location. This is a very "clever" idea since consumers are constantly aware of where their coffee comes from. Still this comes from a very common strategy of selling the story about fair-trading. For instance, Coffee giant Starbucks, in almost everywhere they claimed to got the most exotic and most fair traded coffee beans. Why do these producers put so much effort in showing how much they care about their foreign coffee farmers? The main reason is because coffee is all about socializing, culture, friendship from the outside, but for the inside it's always about the money. For profit-aimed companies it's nothing but the selling grades of course.

Selling the Talk

In this dutch commercial of the well-known coffee brand Douwe Egberts, we see a story about a child and his father. The kid is selling his father a talk by serving him a cup of Douwe Egberts while the father picks up his, probably bad schoolreport, and instantly got the idea. The commercial ends with a pay-off which says: "Every good conversation starts with Douwe Egberts"

Here below is a picture of the package back then in 2007 when the commercial was shot. Is this commercial also a reflection to the reality of child-education. Because the kid knows clearly which pack contains the coffee and how to set up the coffee properly. However there is no word of 'Coffee' mentioned on the package of Douwe Egberts itself. But the red color might associate with the regular package of coffee since the other famous coffee brand like Senseo and Illy also use the color red and dark-brown. Red is really a powerful color, combining the dark-brown emphasize the sharp roasting of the coffee. This symbolic is the most used translation in packaging design. Knowing this fact, Red is more of less a superficial marketing color.

Selling the Flexbox

Like 20 years ago, our roasted coffee beans were packaged in anything but a paper tin-tie bag or metal can. This began to change in 1974 when Fres-Co invented the one-way valve for coffee packaging, named the Conor Packaging. With this new innovation, coffee packaging and the consumer's perception of "fresh" changed forever. Nowadays, the most educated coffee consumers associate a one-way valve with total freshness in a prepackaged coffee.

Conor: Is a "one of a kind" package that transforms a flexible laminate into a semi-rigid flexible box. Fitted with a simple peel seal opening and a re-closable flap. This technique of Conor packaging is called in 1996 as the future of coffee packaging, because of it's flexibility.

The packaging will probably remind us of the French sweet: 'Nougats' rather than coffee. Maybe this is the unthought marketing strategy to sell coffee as a cultural confectionary. Coffee is associated with fresh ingredients like roasted almond, walnut, sugar and honey.

Selling the Stories

Nowadays web shops sells these popular 'upcycled' burlap bag of jute. They named it the Coffee bag and make it sell for a minimum of 50 euro each. It is surely true that coffee bags has a good holding strength since it can nearly hold fifty kilo's a sack of 88x160mm.
Nevertheless the bag has also 'fantastic' stories to them. The farms that this coffee sack comes from is what they confirm, FAIR TRADE farms, which means that there has been no exploitation of the workers on the coffee/tea plantations. But to be honest, how many costumers will care about fair trade if the bag tears after a week?

At the beginning there was

COFFEE!
It has been believed that Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo people were the first to discover and recognize the energizing effect of the coffee bean plant. But the Ethiopian folk didn't keep the secret for long. From the place where it was found, coffee is spread to Egypt and Yemen. The earliest credible evidence of their knowledge about drinking coffee appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi tribe of Yemen. People brought the beans to Arabia where today's Starbuck's and other coffee houses recipes are founded.

Coffee has been moving from place to place. In the time of Egypt people moved their beans in bags. Most of the time these were large cloth sacks. Farmers dispense their crops into these bags for the purpose of transport, and the bags can be used to transport beans at various stages of curing and roasting. Most are extremely heavy. The bag is usually stamped with information indicating where it comes from, what kind of beans are inside, what grade has been assigned to the contents, and so forth. Some people collect such bags as curiosities, since they can be colorful or have interesting decorations. Nowadays there are a more and more package to think of, most of them based on marketing.

Mapping the package

Stacking the cuboid

Like the infamous melon-cube the cubic coffee bean is a lot easier than the regular ones. The cube shaped melons comes from Zentsuji in Kagawa, Japan. Farmers grew the melons in glass boxes and the fruit then naturally assumed the same shape. Today the cuboid watermelons are hand-picked and shipped all over Japan.

But the fruit, on sale in a selection of department stores and upmarket supermarkets, appeals mainly to the wealthy and fashion-conscious of Tokyo and Osaka, Japan's two major cities. This is what we call a fashion food.

Each melon sells for 10,000 yen, equivalent to about $83. It is almost double, or even triple, that of a normal watermelon. The main reason why it's cubic shaped is mainly because it's easy to stack up, packed and deliver. 

The cubic-shaped coffee beans is more expensive than the normal beans. Also it is "easier" to transfer a loads of coffee beans and it has a 'story' when it's served as coffee. Well, is it really easier?

Red cubic-shaped coffee beans

Coffee, known as the third popular drink after tea and water. These little brown pea-shaped bean are influent in our life, especially in the morning. This is because coffee gives us the energy to have a good start. Did you know that coffee beans consist mostly of endosperm that contains 1.0 - 2.5 % caffeine. That is not much. About 40 beans is needed to make a cup of hot coffee. The bean size isn't oval shaped and brown at all. Suddenly the coffee you were drinking is red? The amount of caffeine will rise and espresso might be twice as strong.

Also the pressure would be find in the market. Starbucks has to compete with the well known Red Wine. Coffee is red and comes from the cubic shape. Not only Starbucks but also companies which provides Caramel-coffee candies also needs to change their shapes and package. Also think of this scene. You order a Irish Coffee at the local corner pub. Note that the taste of whisky has reduced, but the amount of alcohol hasn't!

Coffee is a unchangeable product, or crisis will strikes upon the world. Yet there might be a lot benefits…