How to Break Category Rules for Fun & Profit

Let’s look at the hot new trend of flavor blasted(!!!) hard seltzer punches and lemonades. 

This packaging is all bright and full color, with nary a predominately white can in sight. But how can this be? How will people know these are hard seltzers if they don’t look like hard seltzer?

Aside from speaking to a specific product attribute (e.g. Welcome to Flavor Town®, baby!), how can they pull this off?

This works because these are not hard seltzers. Not in the way that the category has come to be defined. 

By having a different functional benefit (e.g. full flavor without all the carbs), and different emotional benefits (e.g. I can indulge without ruining my diet), these are essentially a new category. 

It might be too early to make that bold a claim, but you can see the beginnings of that shift through the packaging and positioning of these products already.

They are not hard seltzers. They are hard seltzer punch. Or hard seltzer lemonade. Or hard seltzer tea. And this means they are not bound by category rules and visual vocabulary of hard seltzer, proper.

This same idea is at play in beer packaging where certain styles, and regions, just have a look. IPAs are green. Lagers look like nostalgic regional brands. Big barrel aged stouts look brown and, well, big and intimidating. Even domestic macro brands have a certain look—which is why, to the trained eye, it’s easy to spot fake craft brands out in the wild. They just can’t shake that mega brand provenance and sheen. 

This framework makes it easy to stand out, visually. Even more so if you don’t have to worry about duking it out with the number 1 brand in a category and therefore can’t take a wild chance on boundary pushing package design. 

Some fun examples? Hazy IPAs have a look that completely separates them from traditional IPAs—namely, maximalist pressure sensitive labels (with minimal branding) slapped on a brite 16oz can. 

Though they share the IPA style in name, Hazy’s have a markedly different visual ruleset than traditional (clear?) IPAs. This styling helps them to be categorically differentiated from traditional IPAs.

So Hazy IPAs are a great example. And sour beers before them. It would’ve been cool to see where the Brut IPA aesthetic could have landed (I’m guessing more nostalgic regional aesthetics). But alas, us fickle beer fans moved onto the next shiny thing, effectively killing it in the cradle before a common language could be defined. 

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The point I’m trying to make here, is that by breaking down visual vocabulary and category “rules,” you will have a framework for working within, and around, depending on your communication and positioning goals. 

You can make something different, just for the fun of it. For the wit and surprise and delight that it brings. 

Or, you can get strategic and create a new category to bypass all of those rules in the first place.

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TLDR: go shotgun a Truly Hard Lemonade Punch this weekend. Just don’t call it a seltzer.