Birmingham needs to change the way the world sees it - says design chief

Mar 15 2009 by Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post

The boss of the Birmingham-based ­design consultancy behind McDonald’s recent global packaging overhaul compared the city’s image problem with the fast food chain’s and said the city needs to “puff its chest out” more.

Paul Castledine, chairman and executive creative director of Fort Dunlop-based Boxer, the agency responsible for the design of the new packaging seen by 56 million customers a day, said both the brands of Birmingham and ­McDonald’s had a lot in common.

Boxer’s brief for the redesign contract was to get the world to change the way it sees McDonald’s food and the agency came up with a packaging system that challenged what it saw as outdated perceptions of the quality of McDonald’s food.

Mr Castledine said: “I see it as a metaphor for Birmingham. We are similar to McDonald’s in that we get a lot of stick. It’s unfair because when you get to know it you know it’s not like that – and the same can be said for McDonald’s.

“Birmingham needs to be proud about what it does and should celebrate its brand, and that is similar to what we are doing with MacDonald’s. It needs to puff its chest out about having some brand vision about what it wants to be in the future and become a dynamo for ideas.”

Boxer, which employs more than 30 people and has worked on packaging with McDonald’s for several years, ­started the process of the latest redesign in 2007.

The agency developed what it called a “global packaging design system” early on in the process, which consisted of the “ingredients” of the finished packaging, such as photos and the text containing stories about the food. Crucially, this was developed in a way it could be ­tailored to each of the 118 countries that McDonald’s operates in.

Mr Castledine said: “For the next stage we had different workshops around the world to talk to all the local markets about how we can make the packaging work for them. It’s about creating a global brand consistency but with flexibility to suit the local markets, whether that be in terms of culture or things like menu items. For example, in the Far East there is a lot more fish, and they have rice burgers.”

Once adjustments had been made in the local markets, the final stage of the process saw the design come back to Birmingham for the master design process. Despite Boxer winning such a huge global contract, Mr Castledine said that he still came up against a lot of barriers when dealing with clients who automatically assumed a London-based agency would do a better job.

He said: “One of Birmingham’s problems I would say is that there is a lot of prejudice towards provincial creative agencies whether they be design or advertising.

“There is this whole thing that the creative world begins and ends in London – this is an example that it actually doesn’t.”

Mr Castledine said Boxer expressed an “inventive and pragmatic” personality, which he compared to the personality of Birmingham as a city.

“We produce something that we call “design that works” and that is something that reflects our industrial heritage in Birmingham.”