OK, funny stuff. The other day as I sat at the kitchen table with my girlfriend eating breakfast, I stared — as many do — at the cereal box in front of me. I eat Post Raisin Bran. This time as I stared at the rectangular box, however, I noticed that the Raisin Bran packaging was a bit different from how I'd remembered it. The overall design was a bit prettier. The box's color was a deeper purple and the the Post logo — an oval with the word "Post" inside it — was more bubbly, more three dimensional. In the center of the box there was a big spoon, which displayed the perfect mix of toasted flakes, creamy milk and gleaming raisins. In short, it looked like the Raisin Bran box at some point between the last time I'd eaten the cereal and this time had been redesigned, given a face lift.
After pondering the box and logo a little longer, I turned to my girlfriend who was sitting right next to me and said: "Why do they always have to change things? Why does everything always have to be spiffed up, given a redesign? Can't they just leave the packaging alone. I mean, it's Raisin Brain. Why do they always have to add all these bells and whistles; why do they always have to add new colors and shine?"
Well, my girlfriend — always willing to offer me a counterpoint — turned to me and said: "They have to change the packaging every few years or so. Otherwise, it'll look like the product is old and stale and no one wants to buy a product that looks like it's old or hasn't evolved with the times."
Fair enough, I thought. But I still wondered what this obsession with constantly changing, updating, redesigning was all about.
Anyway, fast forward one week. My girlfriend and I are shopping at the supermarket and we're walking down the cereal aisle. I'm about to pick up my spiffy box of Raisin Bran when I notice something. There's another box that says Raisin Bran right next to it. But the packaging of this other Raisin Bran is completely sober: the box is plain and brown and has no fancy graphics on it. In fact, this other Raisin Brain box looks like it's from a time when people still drove around in massively big cars with massively big steering wheels and public schools came equipped with fallout shelters. The words "Raisin Brain" on the front of of the box were in plain, blocky 2-D letters. This Raisin Bran is also made by Post, I see, but the bubbly Post oval is gone. Instead, the Post name is written in that plain, blocky style as well.
I rub my eyes. After that, I pick up the cereal and show it to my girlfriend. We both laugh. It turns out, Post recently released some of its cereals in their "vintage packaging." That soberly packaged box of Raisin Brain I saw on the shelf? That's almost exactly what the Raisin Bran box looked like when Post first released the cereal decades ago. No 3-D logos, no golden-brown airbrushed flakes on the front of the box with sparkling raisins and creamy milk, no sidebars telling me about the cereal's health benefits. Just a plain brown, boring box with the words "Raisin Bran" on it. It seems that Post, in a bid to get in touch with its roots or at very least catch the consumer's eye in yet some other way, decided to rerelease this thing and sell it right alongside its modern counterpart.
You gotta love this stuff.
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