People to Have a Say at The 20th FAB Awards

Celebrating their 20th year, The FAB Awards – International Food and Beverage Creative and Effectiveness Awards – have announced the addition of The FAB Choice Award to its recognition program. Similar to a people’s-choice award, the award will be voted on by the public.

Family (and friends) co-founder, Derek Johnston, who came up with the idea for this award revealed: “In the world of packaging creative and effectiveness awards, I hold up FAB as one of the greats; always meticulously judged by real industry experts with carefully-measured views. Notwithstanding, I always have that slight niggle, that as designers and marketers we live in a bit of a bubble. The thought occurred to me that, although an agency or designer makes choices on consumers’ behalf before the brand ever hits the shelf, the end-user ultimately defines design success — do they want to buy it based on its aesthetic and charms?”

“As a logical extension of this process, I thought it might be exciting to mirror the process by allowing the design experts to judge the best of entries, but then ask potential consumers what they loved the most, too. This is not trying to be the X Factor where talent-spotting is put in the hands of the audience, rather it acts to ‘seal the deal’ on what is already considered truly fabulous,” continued Derek.

Clearly the organisers of FAB agreed with him and so The FAB Choice Award will be integrated into The 20th FAB Awards and will be jointly sponsored by Mindlab and Link Consumer, who have been just as instrumental in the introduction of this award.

In 2017, Link Consumer was invited to attend The FAB Awards with the aim to start turning our minds to how we could respond to the brief set by Derek at Family (and friends) to uncover what consumers would choose as their winning pack design,” said Rachel Turner, director of Link Consumer Strategies. “So we joined forces with quant experts Mindlab (who we work closely with on other projects which require a joined up qual/quant approach) and together we designed a bespoke survey for The FAB Choice Award.”

This year, all designs that win either a Silver or a FAB Packaging Creative Award will automatically be entered into the running for The FAB Choice Award. Mindlab will then conduct a series of implicit tests to determine which of the designs perform most strongly and, through analysis, a single winner will be determined. One thousand respondents will take part, representing a cross section of the British public.

“The attributes that we are using to judge consumer endorsement of a pack design have been carefully tested by Link Consumer in face-to-face depth interviews. Using the 24 winning pack designs from last year’s FAB Awards, we started by understanding what the ‘winners’ were from a consumer point-of-view. Taking those winning packs, we asked each person to describe in detail why that pack was so great. From this we generated four key attributes which will help us understand in the context of such a diverse range of products what a winning pack design should add up to; it must be judged as being irresistible, imaginative, striking and ground-breaking to our consumers,” added Rachel.

Link Consumer will also provide the winner of the award valuable feedback gained via the public, during the tabulation process. 

The FAB Choice Award will be awarded during The FAB Awards ceremony, which will once again be held at London’s exclusive Hurlingham Club on May 24, 2018. 

On the same morning, The FAB Awards and YouTube will also co-host The Annual FAB Forum at their St. Giles High Street venue in London. This will once again act as a precursor to The 20th FAB Awards. The invite-only event brings together brands, creatives, media and tech to shine a light on thought leadership and innovation from the Food & Beverage industry.

Source: The FAB Awards

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