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Outside the brown box
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Menasha Packaging is rebranding (and repackaging) itself
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By Nikki Kallio, December, 2009
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Menasha Packaging changed its logo and tagline and released several new retail display products.
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Image is everything. That’s why Menasha Packaging Co. in Neenah decided it was time for a new look. Though the company does make brown boxes, it has another side: one that produces high-end graphic packaging and merchandising products. So in an aggressive rebranding effort aimed at reflecting the innovative side of its business, the company changed its logo and tagline and reorganized internal departments.
A couple of years ago in a money-saving effort, the company changed its former rainbow-colored logo (which is still seen on many of its semi-trucks) to a simpler black and white logo. But that wasn’t conveying the image the company hoped to reflect, says Dennis Bonn, vice president of marketing.
“The black and white logo kind of connotated that we’re a brown box shipping company,” Bonn says. “And we were trying to transition ourselves and make ourselves known in the industry as more than that.”
The company has a lot of brand equity in its logo design and didn’t want to confuse the marketplace by completely redesigning it, Bonn says. So the new design simply maintains the stylized “M” but introduces new colors – gray and green. The gray represents the company’s manufacturing side and the green represents sustainability and the vibrant, color products produced by Menasha Packaging.
The company introduced its new look in early October at the In-Store Marketing Expo in Chicago.
Continuing with simple yet significant changes, company leaders also decided to alter Menasha Packaging’s tagline. Instead of “Innovative Packaging by Design,” now the tagline says “Innovative by Design,” again highlighting its image as more than a brown box company, Bonn says.
Perhaps more ambitiously, the company reorganized its internal departments (now called “groups”) so that they’re easier to navigate and better reflect their purpose.
“I took a customer-view approach to the branding and the reorganization of the nine groups to try to bring some sense to that, and to try to dispel some of the confusion from the outside looking in,” Bonn says.
The company’s new look will appear in advertising, signs and marketing materials, as well as on its website, which should be completely refurbished by Jan. 1, Bonn says.
Michael Tippins, MBA program director for the College of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, says repositioning can be “enormously important since it projects a company’s competencies, capabilities, and says a lot about their products and services.”
If Menasha Packaging is perceived as simply a brown box supplier – perhaps one of many – then customer decisions may be driven mainly by price, and “pricing is never a basis for continuing competitive advantage,” Tippins says.
So, repositioning can be very important for Menasha Packaging “especially if they want to move customers off price and get them focusing on other important buying factors,” which can include quality, innovation and deliveries that are on time, Tippins says.
There’s always a risk of confusing customers with a new look or new messages, but as long as the company is responding to what’s really driving the market and can deliver on its new promises, the effort can be worthwhile, Tippins says.
In addition to the rebranding effort, Menasha Packaging recently released five new retail-ready or display-ready packaging products to the market, some of which already are being used by national brands, says Angie Shepard, assistant sales manager. The products are either simpler for customers to assemble or can be used to pack, ship and display products, eliminating the need to unpack a product and repack it into a display. That eliminates a large amount of waste, both material-wise and labor-wise.
“We’re constantly under pressure from our customers both on the retail side as well as the CPG (consumer product goods) side to reduce costs,” Bonn says. “That can be done in the form of reducing time, labor, or actual cost of raw materials. So in a constant response to that challenge, those innovations, I think, step up to the plate and satisfy that challenge.”
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