A Japanese design firm has won some serious accolades for turning the ubiquitous UPC bar code into a design element. For larger producers who sell through Costco, Sam’s Club, BevMo etc. I think the idea makes a lot of sense. There is nothing more corporate than the UPC and any small effort to personalize and liven it up is money well spent. In Seth Godin talk, it is a “Free Prize”.

Prices for exclusive use of a design, which is apparently tested and works in a supermarket scanner, is $4000 plus a yearly fee of $400. Not cheap, but not overly expensive either.

(Personally, I don’t think that having someone create a similar design in house would be hard at all, and you could test it out on your label stock to be sure it works.)

Here is what the Cannes Titanium Lion jury chair had to say about the barcode designs:

David Lubars… said the winner “transcended an ad or a piece of design; it’s something that will lift the world. They’ve taken something that we see every day that is a depressing symbol and turned it into a new media channel.”

“Lift the world?” I’m not so sure about that, but it does have the potential to pleasantly surprise and bring a smile to people’s faces.

Which might be a very good thing if a recent article on wine marketing which claims that wine is “too precious” for those in the 25-35 category (via Wine Life Today) is correct. From the article:

“We’ve been conscious, those of us in the wine industry, for quite some time, that there is this challenge and opportunity and the challenge is to find a way of better communicating with the next generation of wine consumers.”I think that we have to lose some of the language and communicate in terms which are a lot more everyday; we need to be less technical, less precious.

“That’s not to say though that we should dumb down the wine experience.

“But we do want to be much more welcoming and engaging and we want to have them (younger people) see wine as much more of a fun experience which is relevant to their lifestyle.”

Some fun and irreverent Free Prize marketing like this could be one way to accomplish this. I’ll be sure to look into it, if and when we decide that a UPC code will be needed for our wines.