Turnabout is fair play. Andy Warhol used pop stars, pop culture and pop products to create pop art, and now Dom Perignon has returned the compliment with advertising in homage of Warhol’s iconic silkscreen stencil style. The ad was inspired by Warhol’s March 8th, 1981, diary entry in which he talked about getting together with 20 friends and buying 2,000 bottles of Dom Perignon that they would keep in a sealed room until the year 2000. In an aside comment, Warhol wrote, “the running joke is who will be around and who won’t…” Warhol, who died in 1987, didn’t live to see the day, but he certainly drank plenty of Dom Perignon in his time.

Recently, Dom Perignon commissioned the Design Laboratory of Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design in London to reinterpret its famous champagne bottle in a manner that Warhol would love, using Warhol’s signature red, blue and yellow color combination.

Two questions: What happened to the 2,000 Dom Perignon bottles that Warhol and friends stashed away in 1981? And did anyone break them open in 2000 and toast in the new millennium?

Repackaging is a popular way to refresh an existing product, and sometimes capture more off-season sales. Take the case of Kleenex tissues, which enjoy the greatest sales during cold and flu season, but during the warmer months, not so much. Kleenex looked to spur year-round demand by designing packaging with decorative seasonal themes. Last summer it introduced wedge-shaped “fruit” boxes at Target stores. Offered with colorful watermelon, orange and lime illustrations done by Los Angeles-based artist Hiroko Sanders, the novelty boxes were a huge hit with customers who wanted to add a happy slice of summer to their décor. This year Kleenex has extended its award-winning fruit packaging to major retailers nationwide.

Conversely, the new Kleenex hand towels box is a product that has lovely packaging, but, in my opinion, an unconvincing advertising strategy. The TV commercial shows every household member from the dad and kids to the family dog handling the same cloth hand towel, sending the message that one-use disposable paper towels are more hygienic. Maybe so, but given the fact that cloth hand towels have been shared by family members for decades, maybe centuries, without causing an epidemic illness or skin rashes, the extra precaution seems extravagant and unnecessary. Environmental and sustainability blogs are not buying the argument either, and people have posted comments about wasteful packaging and nonrecyclability, etc. They have a point. Even the way the product is displayed in photographs — wedged in place behind a bathroom towel bar — seems impractical and improvised.

That said, this seems to be a case of good product, wrong marketing pitch. As someone who keeps a roll of paper towels in my car and in my office desk drawer, an attractively packaged box of hand towels has its appeal –more convenient and sanitary than an open roll tossed on the car floor. There are other times when a box of paper towels would come in handy. One can be placed by the workbench in the garage, taken on picnics, used by moms at kids’ playgrounds, and set in the bathroom for occasional guests. Like the seasonal Kleenex tissue boxes, the packaging for hand towels can be designed for different occasions and uses. Actually, a tissue/hand towel combo box would be great too. You never know when you need one or the other.

Of course, every brand wants to suggest that its product is the rage among trend-setting consumers. But Coca-Cola is doing more than just suggesting that it is fashionable to drink its product; it is linking its brand to the world’s top fashion designers and putting its name on beauty products too.

Last fall Coca-Cola Light and eight renowned Italian fashion designers — Donatella Versace, Alberta Ferretti, Anna Molinari for Blumarine, Veronic Etro, Silvia Venturini for Fendi, Consuelo Castiglioni for Marni, Angela Missoni and Rossella Jardini for Moschino — teamed up to present specially decorated contoured bottles for the opening of Milan Fashion Week. Showcased at a Coca-Cola Light “Tribute to Fashion” runway event, the original bottles were later auctioned by Sotheby’s with proceeds going to aid the victims of the devastating 2009 earthquake in Abruzzo, Italy. Collectible bottles were also produced in limited edition and sold in Europe. Some are even finding their way onto eBay.

An even more unusual tie-in to fashion is Diet Coke’s collaboration with Nails, Inc. in the UK to release four shades of Diet Coke nail polish. Called the Diet Coke City Collection, the polish colors are inspired by the four fashion capitals of London, Paris, New York and Milan. During the month of June, Boots stores in the UK gave the nail polish away free with the purchase of two 500 ml. bottles of Diet Coke. The limited edition Diet Coke nail polish is also being sold through the trendy online fashion store, Asos.com , for about $15.

Marketing its one-calorie beverages to the fashion-conscious is an interesting approach, for sure, and it says something about how Coca-Cola is refreshing its brand “around the edges” without tampering with the beloved elements of its identity. Coca-Cola is a product where customers absolutely do not welcome “new and improved.” The company tried that once in 1985 when it introduced the reformulated “New Coke.” It unleashed such an angry consumer backlash that a few months later the company retreated back to the old soda formula. Even its signature graphics — the Spencerian Script logotype, contoured bottle shape, bright red color – are sacred to the brand. People love Coke and take comfort in the familiarity of its taste and look. That can make a marketing campaign go flat fast. So special occasion packaging and quirky targeted audience marketing helps to attract a lot of media buzz and excitement, yet allow Coke to reassure loyal customers that the “touchpoints” of its brand identity will always be there for them.

You’ve heard of vanity license plates; now think of vanity barcodes. In the U.S., Vanity Barcodes, a business started by Reuben and Yael Miller of Miller Creative in New Jersey, has turned these boring UPC codes into decorative elements. They have a number of barcode designs in stock or will customize one to your preference.

The idea of disguising this inventory management device into something else is believed to have originated in Japan with Design Barcode in 2004. The agency made the barcodes an integral part of the packaging design, tying it into the brand or cleverly building the stripes and digits into a line drawn picture.

As simple as this concept may seem, it’s not one that designers should try on their own. As both Vanity Barcodes and Design Barcode emphasize every manipulated barcode has to be thoroughly tested to make sure it gives accurate readings when passed through a retail scanner.

Puma calls their new shoe container their “clever little bag.” Twenty-one months in the making, Puma and Yves Behar’s fuseproject collaborated to design more earth-friendly shoeboxes. They experimented with new folding, shipping and waste reduction techniques, but the improvements were more incremental than monumental. Finally they decided to get rid of traditional shoeboxes (the source of 21 tons of waste a year) altogether and look for an entirely new design solution.

The result is a “clever little bag” that uses 65% less cardboard than the standard shoe box, has no laminated printing, no tissue paper, takes up less space and weighs less in shipping, and replaces the plastic retail bag. The bag is also “stitched” with heat, instead of woven, thus reducing labor and waste. It fits compactly into a suitcase for travel, and afterwards can be recycled.

Puma also claims that the millions of shoes packaged in their bags will reduce water, energy and diesel consumption by more than 60% per year on the manufacturing side alone. Switching to bags will cut paper usage by about 8,500 tons; electricity by 20 million Megajoules; fuel oil by 1 million liters, and water consumption by 1 million liters. On the transportation side, Puma expects to save 500,000 liters of diesel oil. Also by replacing traditional shopping bags, the difference in weight will save almost 275 tons of plastic. Very clever, indeed.

In cafeterias and restaurants around the world, the coffeepot with a distinctive orange band around the neck is immediately recognized as the one containing decaf coffee. Today most people don’t know how that tradition began. Actually, it was once one of the world’s most effective branding campaigns, even though these days consumers don’t associate the color with the product that started it all.

The orange label premiered in 1923 when Sanka, the first commercial decaf coffee, appeared on grocery store shelves in America. In 1932, General Foods bought Sanka (a catchy contraction of “sans caffeine”) and set out to promote the brand to restaurants and diners by giving away free “Sanka-orange” coffeepots and a few samples of the product. Customers and waiters came to recognize that orange signified Sanka, and over time it became the generic color-code for any and all decaf coffee brands.

Decaf coffee itself is an innovation that resulted from trying to salvage a disaster. Legend has it that in 1903 a German coffee merchant named Ludwig Roselius discovered that a shipment of coffee beans got soaked in seawater en route from Nicaragua to Germany. Before throwing out the “ruined” beans, Roselius and his assistant, Karl Wimmer, decided to test them and found that exposure to water actually removed most of the caffeine without affecting the taste. Further research led them to develop the first commercial decaffeination process using steam and chemical solvents — the method used for many years to produce the Sanka brand of decaf coffee. Today Sanka has been overshadowed by dozens of trendier decaf labels, but the brand still has a ubiquitous presence with its signature color orange.

Want to set an elegant table for the holidays? Don’t just put any old bottled water out for guests. Make it French. Make it designer. Make it from the Evian Paul Smith Limited Edition collection. In a tradition started in 2008 with a limited edition bottle designed by Christian Lacroix, followed in 2009 with Jean Paul Gaultier, Evian has just released the Paul Smith Limited Edition 2010 bottle.

The renowned British fashion icon designed the bottle in vibrant colors with a festive theme, featuring his signature stripes and five different multi-colored caps to collect. These days selling bottled water has become harder with countless brands vying for market share and sustainability proponents urging people to drink water filtered from the tap, even adding the bubbly themselves. With its designer bottles, Evian, owned by Danone Waters of America, isn’t touting how its product tastes, but how its bottles look. At $13.95 (USD) for a single 750ml bottle and $118 (USD) for a 12-bottle case, what consumers are buying is imaginative packaging that happens to have water inside.

Attaching the Tide name to this down-market soap, however, was fraught with peril. How do you make sure that Tide “loyalists” remain faithful to the higher-priced “true” Tide, while implying to thrift-conscious shoppers that this version — although not as good — had Tide qualities that made it superior to budget generics?

P&G delineated this difference by calling the product “Tide Basic,” with the emphasis on Basic. The packaging design also had to signal a distinction between the two soaps, while still connecting the Tide brand with the Basic name. From a marketing standpoint, this required delicate surgery. Tide’s bright orange bull’s eye and slanted blue letters have been an ever-present part of the packaging design since the product was introduced in 1946. Making this trademark too prominent on the lower-grade product threatened to tarnish the reputation of the regular Tide brand. Then again, abandoning the familiar orange and blue on the packaging could turn Basic into just another unknown, wannabe detergent product. Basic needed to tout its famous lineage to give it a shelf “leg up” over no-name generics. In addressing this dilemma, the packaging designers arrived at a compromise – a subdued and smaller Tide orange bull’s eye shown on a soft yellow box, with Basic called out large in slanted outlined blue letters. The signature yellow color for Basic looks clean and inviting, although a bit anemic compared to Tide’s boldly confident orange. That may be a message in itself and the right market positioning for a product that is Tide but not really Tide.

Tide Basic, available in powder only, is now being test-marketed in 100 stores throughout the southern U.S. Before launching it into broader markets, the company is moving cautiously to make sure that their Basic approach is sound.

Mucca’s custom-designed type for Brooklyn Fare , called Fare Serif, is presented large in lieu of imagery and projects the unintimidating feel of a first-grade “Dick and Jane Primer.” The text, too, is charmingly direct and humbly free of superlatives. Although the brand elements are applied to every part of the store, from the food labels, wayfinding system, produce displays, and staff uniforms, to the napkins and cups, the effect is smart and playful. It gives Brooklyn Fare the approachable attitude of a 19th century grocer, offering 21st century amenities like sushi, croissants and catering.

Developed by two advertising executives, Richard Fine and Nathan Frank, the New York-based Help takes the anxiety and confusion out of finding a fix for mundane ailments. The actual products inside are not an innovation, but the package design is. Help starts with the basic premise that even typically healthy people need minor medical attention now and then. Reliable remedies have been available for years, but when you’re not feeling great, the last thing you want to do is read overly designed labels offering a dizzying array of curative promises.

Help is essentially little “first-aid” kits packaged by type of ailment. “Help I have a headache” offers 12 acetaminophen tablets. “Help I cut myself” includes eight adhesive bandages in two sizes, shown debossed on the lid. Got a blister, can’t sleep, body aches, allergies? Help is available.

The so-called “brand” language is a plain-spoken self-diagnosis of the physical problem, and the graphic identity is a look of unadorned simplicity. The packaging is designed to alleviate environmental headaches too. The containers are recyclable and biodegradable, made from molded paper pulp and bio-plastic, mostly of corn.

www.helpineedhelp.com