cereal box book report

cereal box book report

The Art of Analyzing Cereal Box Designs: A Scholarly Examination

1. Introduction to Cereal Box Analysis

This understanding sets up our work in subsequent units analyzing the poetry, “On the Subway,” Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, still photography that includes actual print advertisements, modern digital photographs, and selected poems about September 12, 2001, as well as the building of their own questions in relation to a number of screen texts (movies). As media-study methodologies began at identifying and teaching ways to access that inside jargon which so confuses the general populace, classrooms began to move from the highly specialized nature of Media Literacy into actual media- and text-based classes in their own right.

One of the first texts that I analyze with my undergraduates is, in fact, not a “text” at all. We look instead at the box from a cereal package (Cinnamon Toast Crunch) and begin to unpack its rich set of cultural “signs.” This activity teaches about analysis on many fronts and also sets up a larger research paper they are to write in a subsequent unit, one that uses the exact analytical skills that we employ here, involving the examination of a poem or picture of their choice. However, in order to unpack this piece of packaging, they first need to understand that as viewers and consumers, even something as common as a breakfast food package contains cultural signs and symbols in addition to the more obvious logo and trade name.

2. The Role of Visual Communication in Cereal Box Design

Cereal box design is primarily concerned with visual communication. Today, most psychologists assert that 20-30 percent of all human communications are verbal (words, spoken or written). The rest is nonverbal, conveying meaning through some similarity between the code and what it represents or through context. Visual communication spans a wide variety of media, including illustrations, photographs, graphics, symbols, and words. It is, by nature, interstitial, suggesting a sense of place and conveying real-world meaning and context. As a universal language, visual symbols transcend both verbal and geographic speech. Visual signals occur suddenly to capture attention and generate immediate information. Because of the brief time needed to expose these signs, interpretation and response occur together with the image. Nonverbal, visual messages contain both iconic and metaphorical signs. These vernacular signs, which predate written language, continue as essential elements of visual communication. Because semiology examines signs and their interpretation, its contribution to understanding visual communication provides a cogent theoretical basis for evaluating cereal box designs.

3. Nutritional Information and Marketing Strategies on Cereal Boxes

3. Even when these points are presented on the back of the box, they are usually highlighted with a star as a further aid to the hurried shopper.

2. Various nutritional comparisons of the sugars, calories, and other ingredients compared favorably with those of most competitors may be made on the front of the box, saving the consumer the inconvenience of having to search through all the other competitive cereals. Even the toll-free phone numbers usually given on the box for further nutritional information are presented only on the front.

1. The company tries, in most cases, to briefly stress the most important advantages of cereal in general and the content and benefits of their own cereal on the front of the box so that the woman shopper can be informed in only the time it takes to lift the box from the shelf.

Most cereal purchasers are mothers, and many of those mothers are concerned with the eating habits and nutritional needs of their children. In their search for a cereal that is both attractive to eat and nutritious, mothers must rely, to some extent, on the information presented on the boxes of the hundreds of kinds of cereal available to them. The importance of this nutritional information seems to be recognized by the companies in their presentation of it in several ways:

4. Case Studies: Iconic Cereal Box Designs

Cereal box design has received little attention in the design or marketing literature. This study seeks to address this significant gap in our understanding. There has been no active debate regarding narrative design elements, particularly the narrative design elements of commercially successful cereal boxes. The study addresses these concerns by establishing a relational database comprising elements codified from the displayed images and marketing texts on cereal boxes. Utilizing content analysis to dominate design elements, a series of richly annotated descriptions are used to navigate the landscape and reveal associations among these design variables. The late 19th and the pre-20th-century period is utilized, for which a large sample of cereal boxes was readily available in numerous archives and libraries. The narratives will be presented that describe various design elements, with an emphasis on uncovering the potential relationships among marketing variables.

By developing a coded guide for systematic content analysis of cereal boxes, this study seeks to address this gap in the literature. There needs to be some sort of investigative guide. Specifically, how many elements of design should we be looking for and what kind of tools should be used for investigation? It is based on archival and field-specific research of a select group of 219 pre-Department of Labor cereal boxes. The study adopts a preliminary investigative research design that uses a helicopter view of the world details and draws extensive material from existing scholarly works. Data, when necessary, is then distilled, explained and interpreted in all four analytical/hypotheses testing paradigm levels for both the graphical and the verbal narratives within these pre-20th-century cereal box art. With this approach, the study initiates a set of attributes that constitute a design framework, covering issues of both the design feature elements and marketing theory.

This study has thus far outlined the research problem – the lack of scholarly understanding of cereal box design – and its theoretical significance in the context of brand management. It has discussed the subliminal effect of cereal box design, designing a research agenda around iconographic analysis and grounded theory development. It has proposed a first tentative backward transfer model which aims to provide a rudimentary guide and be tested on samples of cereal box designs regularly collected from shopping malls around the world. The rate of change, or the rate of backward transfer, of the designs out in the marketplace would then provide valuable insight into the dynamics of visual and verbal graphic design narratives in marketing and consumer behavior research.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions in Cereal Box Analysis

In applying this methodology to four cereals (Chocapic, Kellogg’s Froot Loops, the Nestlé Lion, and START), it is shown that there is more complexity to these products than the stereotype of fast food served to children could suggest. Additionally, the affinities of cereal design with themes such as television commercial design and snack design are posited. To appreciate the multiple connections that these cereals share with society and culture, a broad approach able to lend cereals sufficient importance is necessary. In this way, a microscopic study, more detailed than those conducted by advertisers and propagandists, inevitably demands an interdisciplinary approach. Any analysis of the theme risks being superfluous as long as the quantitative study of cereal box designs does not exist yet. Any action prior to this would be analogous to pharmaceutical research without empirical experiments; it would lack the scientific foundation that the design study ensures to any discourse, considering its rigor and importance.

For many social scientists, the humble cereal box and its designs are trivial things. However, cereal boxes are important cultural artifacts. The design of the cereal box and its contents are often the subject of contentious debate between parents and children. Its cartoon mascots are ubiquitous. To many, cereal is, in many ways, a childhood rite; important, fattening stuff that is subsidized and fed to kids to ensure that they stay docile through repetition of imaginaries and values supported by the “complete breakfast.” By studying and analyzing cereal box designs, scholars will be able to understand the multiple possibilities and consequences that these products have for the ways in which embodiment, identity, and power are lived. Hosted in the ever-popular Art/Communication collection, this article explores the issues at stake in the study of cereal box design, offering a method for analysis drawn from a matrix measuring 63 characteristics covering a range of themes.