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BUENOS AIRES - Argentina has always known that the eye is not a neutral instrument. Ronald Shakespear redesigned the Buenos Aires subway so that anyone, regardless of literacy, could find their way home. Tomás Maldonado argued for decades that design without theory was decoration, and that people deserved better than decoration. There is a tradition here, less visible than the mythology, of believing that understanding how people actually see things is one of the most worthwhile things you can do with your time.
Fernando Arendar inherited that belief and built a career out of it. He runs Nitid Studio out of Buenos Aires, has shaped packaging for Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, and Danone, and has spent eighteen years doing something the industry rarely stops to do: asking what the person on the other side of the shelf is actually experiencing. Weight. Colour temperature. Lettercase. The difference between a product that feels like it was made for you and one that doesn't, before you have touched it or tasted it or read a single word on the label.
What he has found is that most brands are leaving an extraordinary amount on the table. I sat down with him to hear what he knows.
Understanding consumer behavior and how the brain works completely changes the way you approach a brief.
The questions become very different. Instead of starting with the typical branding questions, such as "What is the brand's vision?" or "What is the brand's mission?", we focus much more on consumer behavior, mental associations, category expectations, and how easy or difficult it will be for people to understand what the brand is trying to communicate.
To me, the most important questions are: Will consumers understand what this product is? Will they know what to do with it? Will they care? Will the design create the right expectations before they even try it?
It also brings a more scientific way of thinking into the design process. We form hypotheses. Then, when the client is open to it, those hypotheses can be tested through research. And that does not always require a huge investment. What it does require is understanding that direct questions like "Which design do you like more?" usually do not give you reliable answers.
What makes me impatient with conventional design thinking is that it often relies on variables that are not very faithful to how consumers actually behave. Buyer personas are a good example. Many brands fall into the idea that Gen Z, or Millennials before them, all behave in the same way, or that a product is only bought by one specific age range. Then reality shows something different.
Our approach to target audiences is based more on what we call the Group Cohesion Score. It focuses on habits, tastes, preferences, cultural similarities, and shared behaviors. That goes much deeper than the year someone was born.
Traditional design also tends to focus too much on aesthetics or trends, while leaving aside how people actually process information. Elements are often added because they look good on screen, or because they feel bold or irreverent, but then the shopper does not understand the product. In those cases, I think the industry often puts the cart before the horse.
If I had to look for categories that are more open to disruption, I would probably start with the most "boring" ones, so to speak. Categories where the visual codes have been stagnant for a long time can create more room for surprise, especially because they are often less explored by people launching new brands.
That said, I would be very careful with categories where safety and trust are central to the purchase decision. If people are asking themselves, even subconsciously, "Is this safe for me to consume?" then disruption needs to be handled very carefully.
The key is to balance novelty with familiarity. If you go too far, the design can fail. Being first is also difficult and risky, because as human beings we usually look for some kind of social proof. We want to know that other people have already tried something, because that reduces uncertainty. And uncertainty is metabolically costly for the brain.
So I think brands need to be cautious when using nonprototypical or unconventional packaging. They need to understand how it will affect perceptions of safety, trust, usability, and product clarity. They also need to ask whether consumers are really willing to accept a less practical package just because it feels "crazy," original, or never seen before.
I would not point to specific brands and say they are about to make a huge mistake. But without naming names, I do see many food products using packaging formats borrowed from nonfood categories, or the opposite. Many of those products either do not survive or eventually have to return to a more typical category presentation in order to work in the mass market.
One of the clearest differences we found, and something I had already suspected, is that Argentine consumers, and I would even say many Latin American consumers, tend to be more traditional in how they read packaging.
They are generally less used to seeing highly disruptive brands in supermarkets, especially compared to consumers in markets like the US or the UK. Because of that, they may be more likely to distrust nontraditional presentations.
That was reflected in the research. Nonprototypical packaging may attract attention, but in more traditional markets, attention does not necessarily translate into trust or purchase intent.
For any brand trying to go global, the lesson is that packaging codes do not travel perfectly. A design that feels fresh and exciting in one market may feel confusing, risky, or less trustworthy in another. Global brands need to understand local category expectations before assuming that disruption will be received the same way everywhere.
First of all, I appreciate that statement.
I think Latin America in general, and I have been lucky to travel through a large part of it, has an incredibly rich artistic and visual culture. That creates a kind of visual learning, or mental map, that becomes very useful when working with packaging.
In Argentina specifically, design culture is very strong. There is a high sensitivity to visual expression, but also a strong relationship with tradition, food, rituals, and everyday consumption. That combination shaped the way I see packaging. I do not see it only as a design object. I see it as a set of cues that people make sense of through culture, memory, expectations, and context.
A lot. Honestly, I thought companies would be much more open to these findings by now.
But many times, what happens is similar to what is known as the Semmelweis Effect. In simple terms, it is the tendency to reject new evidence when it contradicts established beliefs or the way things have always been done. Even when the evidence is useful, people can resist it because accepting it would mean questioning their previous decisions.
That has changed over time. The growth of behavioral science, consumer psychology, and a more scientific view of marketing has helped a lot. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute also played a major role in pushing the industry to think more seriously about evidence and consumer behavior.
Today, both large and smaller brands contact me because they want to understand exactly that: what they may need to adjust in order to avoid being misperceived. And those misperceptions often translate directly into monetary losses.
A product can be excellent, but if the packaging creates the wrong expectation of taste, quality, weight, freshness, naturalness, or value, the brand may be losing sales before the consumer even tries it.
In a way, my deeper interest in consumer behavior and how the brain works was born from exactly that experience.
I had been in those rooms before, presenting packaging work for major consumer brands, and I often felt that the typical branding language was not enough. There was a lot of jargon, but not always a strong explanation for why a package might work or fail from the consumer's point of view.
That is where my search really began. I wanted to understand consumers better, and at some point, I realized I needed to start reading more science books and fewer branding books.
More recently, I have been back in rooms with some of those companies, but more in the context of training, talks, and education, not to tell people they were wrong.
And knowing the Semmelweis Effect, I do not think it is wise to approach those situations by saying, "You are wrong." Nobody likes to feel that the work they have spent months developing is being dismissed.
The better approach is to show how consumers process information, how expectations are formed, and how certain design decisions may create friction or confusion. When people understand the mechanism, they are much more open to reconsidering the design.
The line usually disappears when there is no clear criterion behind the decision. It happens when packaging becomes a personal preference, a creative caprice, or when the team relies on oversimplified ideas about design and consumers.
I have been lucky in that most of my clients take my direction seriously. But I have also seen many brands arrive with a lot of baggage from previous service providers. Sometimes they have been told design theories that sound almost like astrology.
For example, we once worked with a client who already had their branding designed and needed to enter major retail chains. Their product description was written entirely in lowercase. I explained that mixed case, with uppercase and lowercase letters, is usually easier to process mentally because the word shapes are more recognizable.
The client told me that their previous consultant had recommended lowercase because it made the brand feel more inclusive, since all the letters were at the same height.
That kind of idea may sound interesting in a presentation, but it has no empirical or scientific basis. And there are many theories like that in design. They sound clever, but they do not necessarily reflect how people actually perceive, read, or choose products.
Grüns has made design adjustments to its packaging, and from what I understand, Huel has done the same over time. If you look at both brands, they are actually quite clean in their visual presentation. That kind of design often communicates simplicity, control, and fewer ingredients, or at least that is how consumers tend to perceive it.
I do not know if that was the intention from the beginning, but it clearly had a positive impact.
The important point is that for a product to be chosen, it does not necessarily need to look beautiful in the traditional sense. It needs to create the right expectations and the right mental associations.
We have seen many cases where brands with a homemade or craft-looking package were acquired by larger companies. Then the new owners redesigned the packaging to make it look more modern or polished, but in doing so, they removed the elements that helped consumers connect the brand with ideas like homemade, traditional, pure, or craft.
So the relationship between aesthetics and value is not as simple as "better-looking design equals more willingness to pay." Sometimes the less polished cue is exactly what makes the product feel more authentic or more valuable.
Packaging, or at least the way packaging is presented, will have to adapt to those platforms.
The truth is that packaging has not fully adapted to online shopping yet, even though products have been sold online for many years. One simple example is the confusion shoppers often experience around size. They see a product online, assume it has a certain dimension, and then receive something that feels much smaller or larger than expected.
Many brands are not fully aware of this. There is a phenomenon known as familiar size bias, where consumers tend to overestimate the size of small products and underestimate the size of large products when they see them online.
So in ten years, packaging may not only be about how a product performs in physical retail. It may also be about helping digital systems, retailers, and consumers understand the product correctly without physical browsing.
Even if the consumer is not walking through a store, the package will still carry important information: category, size, flavor, quality, trust, usage context, and brand memory. The format may change, but the role of packaging as a system of cues will not disappear.
One thing I find very interesting is the development of printed OLED technology that could eventually be integrated into packaging.
I am not talking about a food brand specifically, but about a company working on a system that could turn static packaging surfaces into dynamic ones. From a packaging perspective, that is fascinating because it could introduce motion, light, or changing information directly into the pack itself.
Considering how strongly we are drawn to movement and changing stimuli, I think it could be very interesting to see how this evolves and how brands use it.
As for something many people think is brilliant but that I do not think works as well as people believe, I would go back to what we discussed earlier: the boom around chaos packaging.
I understand why it is attractive. It looks bold, surprising, and very shareable. But from a consumer perception point of view, it can also create confusion, lower trust, and make the product harder to understand. Attention is not the same as purchase intent, and visual disruption is not automatically a business advantage.
There are many things brands can get wrong, and we have already discussed several of them. But one of the biggest mistakes I see is the tendency to design for the younger generation of the moment.
Right now, many brands are obsessed with Gen Z. In a few years, it will be the next young generation. The problem is that brands often assume that an entire generation acts the same way, likes the same things, and expects everything to look disruptive, modern, or unconventional.
Then reality hits. They realize their consumers are more diverse than they thought, or more diverse than they were told.
Another common mistake is chasing trends out of FOMO. Brands redesign their packaging to follow what is fashionable, but in the process they remove the brand assets and category cues they spent years building.
One of the most famous examples is New Coke, launched in 1985. Coca-Cola reacted strongly to the Pepsi Challenge, where many participants preferred Pepsi in blind taste tests. But what they did not fully account for is that people do not consume brands blindly in the real world.
There is something called the familiarity heuristic. When consumers are deeply familiar with something, changing it can create rejection or make the new version feel risky. As I mentioned earlier, uncertainty is metabolically costly for the brain.
Many brands still make a similar mistake today. They test taste in isolation, or they change formulas and communicate those changes too aggressively on the front of the package, without understanding how perception, memory, and familiarity shape the actual consumer experience.
Argentina is very well known for its meat, so if you eat meat, I would take you to a parrilla. One place I always recommend is El Pobre Luis. It is usually where I take clients when they visit Buenos Aires, and it is also the place I recommend to Americans traveling to Argentina.
The last thing I bought for myself was a pair of Nike tennis shoes. I had needed to replace mine for a while, and I am also very aware of how that kind of thing can affect performance, even if it sounds a little unbelievable.
There is evidence showing that even adding a brand to a set of golf clubs can improve players' performance. So, as you can see, science ends up influencing almost every activity in my life.
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