Polaroid Package Design, Before and After

The photo below was my solution to getting Polaroid into some decent packaging with a chance of developing product identity and the "branding" we hear so much about today. Gray was retained only for continuity, the black end panels to subdue Kodak yellow that saturated every marketplace and had upstaged the drab over-all gray and soap bubbles of prior Polaroid packaging.

POLAROID was purposely set in caps to give a consumer help in identifying and perhaps even remembering the brand name. I took a lot of flak in meetings from resident MBAs who had read business guru Ernst Dichter, who had proclaimed from on high that black was a morbid color and should not be used in the marketplace*. Fortunately, Stan Calderwood overruled them. He could see the importance of fighting back against Eastman and how well the end panels would show up on television, where he had planned to spend some money. It must be remembered that television images were only black-and-white at the time.

_*It took only about ten years for black packaging to become very popular for photo products.

Photos by Mel Goldman Studio, Boston