Nestlé’s Lean Cuisine Marketplace redesign tops first Nielsen Design Impact Awards

NEW YORK — Nielsen and The Dieline on Tuesday announced the winners of their first-ever Nielsen Design Impact Awards from the HOW Design Live Conference in Chicago. The awards recognize product redesigns from the past two years, as well as the impact the redesigns have on business. 

 

At the top of the list was Nestlé’s Lean Cuisine Marketplace brand, whose new design was aimed at positioning the brand as a wellness partner instead of as a diet brand, and the rebrand brought the company a sales increase of $58 million in the year following its introduction. 

 

"The new design was the no. 1 reason the Lean Cuisine brand was able to turn itself around—we went from declining sales to significant sales gains even before we turned on media support," Nestlé USA VP marketing Daniel Jhung said. "The bold new Marketplace packaging signified a major pivot away from our 'diet' heritage toward our new modern health and wellness partner positioning, motivating consumers to re-engage with our brand again. This complete turnaround demonstrates the power of investing in effective package design and designing it with consumers in mind."

 

These awards were the first time that package design awards leverage retail performance data as part of the process used to identify a winner, Nielsen said. The company surveyed thousands of consumers to assess how well the redesigns addressed its communication objective and to gauge purchase preference for the new package over the old ones. 

 

"Package design often doesn't get the attention or respect it deserves compared to other marketing tactics. One of the root causes for this oversight is that it's difficult to attribute sales impact to package design," Nielsen Design Solutions SVP product development Steve Lamoureux said. "Given Nielsen's vast data assets, we knew we were in a unique position to demonstrate the power of effective package design and celebrate the brands who are really embracing its potential."

 

Besides Lean Cusine Marketplace as the grand prize winner, the awards recognized:

 

Nielsen has compiled a full report on the awards that includes interviews with winners, which can be read here.