Review #209: Count Chocula Box Design
Man, I love Count Chocula. I remember it being a treat when I was a kid because it wasn’t always available in the area I lived in. In high school I even sent away for a bean bag toy that I’m sure I still have somewhere at my folk’s house. We just started carrying Count Chocula at the store where I work and the first thing I noticed was the odd design of the box.
It wasn’t that compared to Sonny, the cracked-out Cocoa Puffs bird, he looked more like a stoned greaser. Naturally I’m fine with that. What it was was that there is no cereal on the front. If you don’t already know what Count Chocula cereal is composed of this box design would not convinvce you that you want to eat it. You don’t know what it is! I think it takes a lot of balls for General Mills to think that the cereal will sell on it’s own reputation. It might, but for such a company to dumb down it’s advertising, especially on the product itself, is just a bad marketing move. They have done the same thing with their other cereals in the monster-inspired line, FrankenBerry and BooBerry.
There IS an image of the cereal itself on one of the narrow sides of the box, of all places. If I sound too nit-picky, I’m telling you: This is the first thing someone would point out in a critique if this were an assignment for a first-semester graphic design course.
May 31st, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Well, it IS brown, like chocolate, which is apparently why they put so many of those boring fucking brown M&Ms in the bags, to make people associate them with chocolate. I’m pretty sure people know that M&Ms are chocolatey. Man, I miss the tan M&Ms.
Here’s a relevant link:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29263
June 1st, 2007 at 4:57 pm
I have a feeling the General Mills did some product testing on the box images, and found that KIDS DON’T FUCKING CARE WHAT’S IN THE BOX. I doubt that most are cognizant enough to realize they are looking at food. Instead they look and the box and FLIP THE FUCK OUT because they are INSANE. Who understands children anyway, they have brain damage.