A Call to Arms

For this instalment of Package Design Matters, we went to Highland Park, IL, to the home of Jon Denham, current vice president of design at ConAgra Foods, Inc. In this role, Denham pulls on his design, branding and business skills and experience to bring new ways to think of branding to ConAgra. He seeks to also evolve design to affect innovation across the organization and make ConAgra faster, more effective and more efficient.

A recent win for Denham and his team is the redesigned packaging for P.F. Chang’s frozen foods, which it manufactures under license. “The work looked good at the time,” Denham explains, “but it wasn’t as effective in the marketplace as we expected it to be.” The group reassessed not only the packaging but they also re-evaluated how the organization looked at the work. Out of those evaluations came a design that communicated more effectively from the freezer case. “The design is now doing well because of simple changes such as creating more contrast and making sure that the P.F. Chang’s logo could be seen more than three feet away,” Denham says.

This willingness to honestly assess his own and his team’s work is part of Denham’s formula for success. “As I look back on my career, and I think of all the mistakes that I made,” Denham intimates. “Some of them were just outright embarassing, but you’ve got to learn from the mistakes. I think of the concept behind Failing Forward, which is a great book on this concept. Take what you can learn from your mistakes, and translate that into what’s your next action.” Today, ConAgra has a system in place to make sure that the design team is asking the right questions about a design project versus designing for design’s sake. Denham characterizes the model as effective but almost whimsical in its simplicity. “We call it a 3-D model,” he explains. ere are three questions that designers need to ask of any and all work they do at ConAgra, whether it’s for the company’s own brands or its private-label customers: Is what you’re doing distinct? Is it deliverable? Is it desirable?

DON’T BE AFRAID TO CHALLENGE

The 3-D model has helped kick-start conversations with the design team and has given them permission, in a way, to question the ideas behind their work. This has made ConAgra more effective and efficient. “If this is not distinct, if it’s not desirable, if it’s not deliverable, then it’s probably not worth spending too much time on,” he says. “If you are going to spend time on it, we have got to create a pretty compelling story as to why. If we’re not getting the customer or the consumer to desire what we’re creating, if we can’t do it and if it’s not distinct, then it’s probably not going to be the best investment.”

This system is especially important when communicating design strategies to ConAgra’s private-brand customers. “My job, at its core, there, is to facilitate,” Denham says. “I don’t own the design; the brand owners own it. But you have to think of the values in the 3-D model and just ask, ‘What are we really trying to achieve, and have we thought this through?’ Sometimes, it’s the last thing a design manager wants to hear or do because he or she is being held accountable on timing of a project. But at the end of the day, if we’re doing something that’s not going to build value into the business and make consumers part with money, we need to make sure that it’s worth doing. It’s very tough, and it may create a short-term issue. So you need to go back with a convincing, influencing argument.

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“It’s interesting,” he adds. “One of the things you’re taught at college that’s tough to hold onto in the commercial world is the theoretical right way to do design: Being in touch with what consumers or what customers are doing, and what’s influencing them, and knowing how to use that to start to create solutions. When you come into the commercial world, a lot of that process of understanding has been done for you. You are told, ‘Here’s the order. Go fulfill the order.’ And sometimes the order makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. You have to step back and say, ‘What are we really trying to achieve? And is the order that just came in the right order? Or do we actually need to go back and work with these people to figure out what the right order should be?’”

BUILDING CREDIBILITY

That courage needs to be applied not only to tactfully but clearly question, but also to defend your work and ideas, all the way up to the C-suite. “I think back to one point in my career where the CEO of the company had come back from an international assignment where he’d been exposed to very sophisticated design and he saw that as a competitive advantage,” Denham says. The CEO came back to the U.S. and asked for Denham to join him and the R&D leader in evaluating the year’s package design work. “The CEO looked at one of the absolutely critical brands and said ‘I’m not sure that’s right,’” Denham recalls. Although he was excited for what at the time was the rare opportunity to review designs with a CEO, he challenged the CEO’s assessment.

“Instead of the conversation ending with, ‘We need to go and fix it,’ he said, ‘I hear what you’re saying and you’re expert in this area, so let’s run with it and see what happens,’ Denham recalls. The brand that the CEO wasn’t in love with was an incredible business success. Even in the depths of the recent economic depression, Head & Shoulders still grew at a healthy rate.

One of the takeaways Denham gained from that interaction is “not everybody is going to love your design” and that a designer needs to stand up for his or her design and ideas with robust reasons. “You need a huge amount of courage,” Denham opines, “and that courage has to be very durable.”

Courage is one thing, but how does a designer make an effective argument to senior business leaders, especially those high-powered leaders in the C-suite? Denham contends that’s when a designer needs to take on the roles of student and educator. “Understand what’s important to them,” Denham urges. “I remember a co-worker and friend once said, ‘Come and walk in my shoes and then we can have a conversation about design and how that plays a role.’”

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Denham also argues for learning the language of business so you can have meaningful conversations versus surface conversations that focus on generalities. He explains, “How can you expect to have a conversation with the C-suite if you don’t understand them?” When Denham was a structural engineer in the R&D department at P&G, he attended a course titled, Financial Training for Non- financial People. “I was like, ‘I have to go to this course to at least have some understanding of the financial implications of what we are doing,’ because I’m talking with business people all the time,” he recalls. “That moment was so important. When I think of the times when I’ve had more impact and more influence, it’s because I’ve understood the business much more thoroughly.”

Unfortunately, Denham says, designers are rarely taught the language of business at school. When designers start working in commercial roles, especially in corporate positions, they will be exposed to and expected to participate in conversations with financial implications. Understanding the financial language of business will help tremendously to build a designer’s credibility.

To ensure that the conversation goes both ways, designers must also teach business leaders about design and the design process. Educating non-designers in the company about the design process and language will encourage them to engage in the conversation, gain empathy for designers about the design process, and help everyone collaborate to refine the package design process.

“This is not just specific to ConAgra, but I remember when I first joined the company,” Denham says, “when new business arrived, the customers would call me like I was the 1-800 number for the design being late. At that time, I didn’t yet know why a particular design was late. But I found out.”

Denham learned there were a number of contributing reasons, sometimes the fault was design’s and sometimes it was someone else’s.

He then took the time to not only do the research into what happened but figure out how to “play back that data in a way that makes sense.” This enabled Denham to transition the conversation from a one-sided protest assigning fault to how do we change the process or system. “I hardly ever get those calls anymore,” Denham remarks. “The only time I do get those calls are on businesses that are newer or categories that are newer to the company because we’ve not had time to have that conversation.”

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BUILDING BRIDGES WITH LANGUAGE

When business leaders know design language and understand the process, they can serve as more than internal or external clients. They can also serve as mentors. “I firmly believe in having multiple mentors and using them as frequently as I can, as taxing as that can be for them,” Denham says. “One of my mentors fundamentally changed the way I view the design part of my job. My mentor told me, ‘Your job is to show the art of what’s possible.’ When I first heard it, it seemed superficial.’ But when I sat back and thought about it, I saw the remark’s greatness and decided I need to remember that quote exactly because I now think design’s job is to show the art of what’s possible and that can make people feel uncomfortable.

“I can think of the times where we’ve shown the art of what’s possible, and it feels like you might as well be Ebola,” he continues. With time, the new thinking usually influences the business and the company as a whole.

It’s clear that these fruits of wisdom from mentors are especially nutritious because they’re grown in sunshine from a point of view outside either the design department or the company. “You get great feedback—great conversation that will mold or get you to think differently about what you should be doing,” Denham says. 

 HONESTY WINS

“As unbelievably cliché as it sounds, feedback is a gift,” Denham remarks. “A lot of people cringe when they hear that phrase, and I understand. Some of the feedback, I’ve received was incredibly painful and hurtful at the time. But if you can strip away that emotional anxiety, what you find the next morning is there’s usually something there that you need to act on.” 

Denham looks for this honest feedback not only from his superiors and mentors but from the people he works with, including the design firms he hires. “When I was at Kraft, I worked with a topnotch agency in London that had a characteristic I always look for,” Denham says. “They could teach me something versus an agency that I’ve got to push. We worked together to create a different design language for that corporation.” The four key aspects of the company culture examined was 1) the corporate mission and values, 2) changing the core identity, 3) changing the environment in which design and innovation happened, and 4) taking that new culture and affecting new change in the brands.

Eighteen months after Williams Murray Hamm and Denham presented those ideas to Kraft’s CEO, the agency and Denham were preparing a presentation on the work. When they worked on the slide that detailed their recommendations to the company, Denham was struck by the fact that all of those goals were achieved. “I remember walking out of the office,” Denham says. “It was a sunny day in London. They have three or four of them in a year. I felt like I was on cloud nine. It was just a great moment.” Several successful package designs grew from this work on the corporate culture, including work done with other agencies, such as the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese line redesign. 

“Simple visual implementation bought a fragmented franchise back together,” Denham says. “The brand had become increasingly fragmented and hadn’t visually evolved for quite some time.” The problem, albeit a good one to have, is the brand equity for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is colossal. Consumers not only had strong emotional ties to the product but also its blue box.

“In this country, Macaroni & Cheese is a staple in its own right,” Denham remarks. “There was concern about how to bring the brand to life in a compelling way that wouldn’t introduce changes that would break that emotional connection consumers had to the product and its packaging. When Kraft used the shape of a macaroni noodle to create a smile, it repositioned the brand and brought a fragmented franchise back together. is delivered a consistent experience for consumers. So it wasn’t just Easy Mac that was on the customers’ radar.”

THE FUTURE OF DESIGN

“Design will be quickly commoditized,” Denham says. “It will somehow take that great cliché, last decoration station to market, unless it shows up at the table with ideas that will influence a different outcome for a brand—an outcome that is more positive for business.”

Business results is the first and foremost variable in the five Golden Rules used by Denham to evaluate package designs. The five golden rules ask if the package design is 1) delivering business results, 2) receiving positive management feedback, 3) can improve multiple brands with peer adoption, 4) receiving positive feedback from peers, and 5) being delivered in a timely fashion or is relevant to what’s happening in the business now.

KNOW WHEN TO HOLD THEM

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But Denham is quick to note that a design that’s not relevant today isn’t necessarily poor. “At several different points in my career, we’ve brought ideas to the table that received pushback because something similar had failed five or ten years ago,” Denham says. “My argument often is that times have changed and maybe people will look at this differently. I understand the risk that consumers won’t, but it’s worth reassessing.”

Denham also suggests “sitting” on ideas that are ahead of their time. Although it’s difficult not to immediately share a great idea, it’s better to wait until the time is right and look like a hero versus have a great idea killed because the timing wasn’t right. When the timing is right, the designer can then deliver the solution quickly. Denham suggests looking at the action not as holding back, but as thinking two steps ahead. “In ConAgra, that’s a value that the company puts a lot of emphasis on—thinking two steps ahead,” Denham remarks.

REFRAMING THE CONVERSATION

Another core value at ConAgra is collaboration. Success at ConAgra requires not only being able to collaborate across departments, but it also requires designers to be able to navigate its private-label customers’ worlds. “It’s not a business model that readily comes to a lot of designers in an easy way,” Denham says. “When working on private-label brands, designers need to know the biggest difference is that we don’t own the business. That may seem like a trivial thing, but it’s absolutely colossal. “The private-label customers have different ways of working,” he continues. “They have different agencies. They have different timeframes. Sometimes their timeframes are incredibly short, and sometimes a little bit more flexible. So you have this wild diversity of customers who own their businesses, own their designs, and come to us to interpret those ideas and then manufacture against it.”

On the surface, this part of the business seems executional. A collaborative approach to the business, though, can transform the work from executional to strategic. The first opportunity for a more strategic work flow lies in the focus on the time aspect in the private label work flow.

Designers can use the timeliness requirement of the executional work flow to proactively create relationships with the private label customers’ design teams and design resources. “Become like a process detective, and you can influence the customer’s organization to modify or dramatically change its behavior,” Denham remarks. “You can start by reaching into some of your customers design resources and ask, ‘How do our systems enable you to do your work in the most effective way?’”

These resources can also help you understand the customer’s culture by shedding light on when and where you can push for ideas, where do you need to back off, and how to best communicate a process or idea to them. “It’s something you build over time,” Denham says. “It’s a tough thing to do because these firms are being paid by the customer, and so their allegiance at the end of the day is to whomever is paying them.” 

Denham has also prioritized the need to create relationships with his peers in ConAgra’s private-label customers, and this has created a two-way dialogue between the packaged goods manufacturer and the private label brand owners. That two-way dialogue often results in improved design processes and better results in the high-cadence world of private label packaged goods.

This approach also helps prevent burnout within both organizations. “It’s good to have some people around you that can remind you that you are actually having impact, especially if a designer is working in an environment hostile to design,” Denham remarks. “Every designer needs people to remind him or her of what they’re there to do and to celebrate the good stuff. That’s tough to do because we’re not programmed to celebrate good.”

BUILDING TEAMS THAT DELIVER

Another challenge is that Denham’s team is spread across the country in different offices. In this scenario, it becomes even more important to build relationships and learn about people’s passions. “I was visiting an office, where I had a big team,” Denham says. “So I wanted to meet every single one of them, so I scheduled one-to-one meetings back to back. I remember this one lady came in and she was physically shaking, so I asked her, ‘What’s the matter?’ She replied, ‘I think you’re here to re me.’ I said, ‘No, I’m here to find out what you’re passionate about,’ and she said, ‘Oh, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’”

Her response was a bit of surprise: “I’m passionate about club store.” Denham found that interesting because it wasn’t an answer he received from other design managers before. He questioned her about what was stopping her from pursuing her passion, with the intent to enable versus criticize. “There was a pregnant pause, and she said, ‘I don’t have any funding to do the work,’ and my reaction was, ‘Okay, we can take care of that,’ Denham recalls.

After removing her roadblocks, this woman was able to deliver club-store design work that not only was compelling for the brand she worked on but also could be expanded across other parts of the business. “It was great for her, and her contribution to the team became that much more relevant, so she became a happier employee,” Denham recalls. “Frankly, everybody was happy because the business results were better.”

Throughout his career, Denham has led stellar teams. “I think I’ve had a lot of good fortune all over my career,” he says. “But there are some constant values that drive how I build teams.”There are five top qualities that Denham looks for in team members: the ability to 1) inspire, 2) be passionate, 3) show leadership, 4) ideate and 5) implement.

He also uses a system called the CARE model to make sure that his teams are structured with members with complementary skills. “CARE is an acronym for Creative, Refiner, Advocate and Executor,” he explains. “If you have a very creative person, who wants to do ideation all the time, you need to partner him or her with somebody who’s really good at thinking through the idea though and refining it. Teams also need an advocate, who can communicate the team’s ideas to people outside the team and create advocacy for what you’re doing. Then there’s the executor, whose skill and passion is about executing the idea with excellence.”

Denham considers it his responsibility to create an inspiring environment for all his team members. “As we’ve talked about burnout, we started looking at options to give employees a broader sense of development to get around some of those burnout issues,” he explains. “When I was a kid, I went on a foreign exchange. And I haven’t done this and am not aware if anybody else has done it, but if I can take somebody out of my internal design team and put them in an agency for a given period of time, and I would do the opposite for the agency, I think there will be a lot of a-ha moments. It would require thinking through the visibility challenges, but it could be a very fertile idea to develop and address multiple industry challenges.”

Just as he seeks to create an inspiring environment for his employees, Denham looks for corporations that do the same for management. 

He also looks for a corporation that believes in collaboration, values doing something different with design, has good opportunities to create brand stories, offers management a degree of autonomy and has an element of humanity.

“Some in your audience might be surprised to hear this, but a brand I think has a colossal and phenomenal rich heritage is Chef Boyardee,” Denham says. “Today, it’s a very value-based brand but the story behind it is terrific. It goes back to somebody who came off the boat from Italy, learned to trade, became an entrepreneur, set up his own restaurant, and then started mass manufacturing the stuff to create a really prolific brand, which has all this history associated with it.

“I don’t know if you know this about Healthy Choice, but the brand came after a former CEO of ConAgra had a life threatening moment in his life,” he continues. “He had to radically change his diet—his whole routine. So he did and out of that came the brand Healthy Choice. So, there’s this tremendous authenticity story behind it.

“And I think of humanity,” Denham says. “When I think of Skype, I think of this phenomenal piece of advertising I saw at a conference. Two young ladies, opposite sides of the world, never met each other but had some inherent birth defect that molded their lives. These ladies were connected through Skype, and Skype took the extra step of actually physically connecting them. So they flew the young lady from the United States to Australia, and they actually met up. More than half of the audience watching this advertising didn’t have a dry eye because the humanity aspect of that work was so huge. So I think about more than just the clichéd corporate talk about things like work-life balance. I ask, ‘Is it a great place to work, and would I enjoy going to the office?’

“I also think a degree of autonomy is important,” he adds. “Despite what some people might think, autonomy doesn’t mean ‘my way or the highway.’ But it does mean that you have some opportunity to make some decisions and know that your decision is going to count for something.” 

REINVIGORATE, REINCENT AND RE-ENERGIZE

Denham especially wants the autonomy to help prevent his team and him from experiencing burnout. “It’s very easy when you’re in the throes of a fast-moving environment to forget about how you can reinvigorate, re-incentivize and re-energize people whether they are part of your direct design management team or folks you collaborate with,” he opines.“Some of the things I’ve done is allow employees to spend 20% of their time working on something that’s not an active project today. It’s a very tough thing to manage because you need a very forward-thinking mindset.

“We [ConAgra] are getting much better at providing inspiration on an ongoing basis,” Denham continues. “More recently, we’ve taken folks off site, exposed them to different inspiration whether it’s in category or out of category, and gave them different thinking models.

“Sometimes, you can change the frame of reference and ask a different set of questions with an enforced time out,” he says. “We’ve had the situation where it’s been feasible to do, and it made a huge difference. One day you could be working on a household cleaner and the next day you could be working on a beauty care product or something like that, and that different context, different frame of reference, gives the designer an inspirational moment and a great opportunity to manage burnout, which I can see happening all around the industry. 

“I had a great manager who gave me an enforced time out,” he adds. “I was very reluctant for it to happen, and my manager’s response was, ‘This is happening. You’re going to like it. Just try it.’ I was in that role for three years, and I had a great time. So when I came back to the role that I originally was on the path to, I was much more energized and invigorated to take it on. I wasn’t burnt out.’”

Outside of work, Denham looks to travel, trends forums and chats, and audio books for inspiration and reinvigoration. “I’m one of the worst readers on the planet, which might disappoint you,” he says. “One of the things I admired about Claudia, (Denham worked with Claudia Kotchka at P&G) is she’s a voracious reader. Now I have a long commute, so I listen to books during those 45 minutes of what would otherwise be dead time. Now, I’ve actually listened to more books than have read books in recent times.”

“I also, from time to time, dabble with pottery,” he says. “As you probably remember, my father when he was alive was a sculptor, painter and threw pots as well. He was way better than I would ever hope to be, but it’s some of the fun stuff on the periphery.”

Denham’s most high impact project, with which he carries a great deal of influence, is the raising of his nine-year-old twins. “They are in a great time in their life,” he says, “Seeing how they evolve. Now that’s inspiring.”