I spoke to a couple of Chiquita representatives about the popularity of the sticker-remixing stunt, and in less than 10 minutes they used the word “emotional” at least five times — as in “designed to re-engage that emotional connection with consumers” or “really resonate on an emotional level.” Are people really emotional about their banana shopping? I suppose anything is possible. (Although probably the people who are most emotional about the Chiquita brand, really, would link it to a history of controversy over labor practices, the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in the 1950s and the $25 million government fine it paid in 2007 for paying protection money to paramilitary groups in Colombia.) I think the site Design:Related is closer to the truth when it points out that the stickers “just look cool.”

Image Credit... From top: Logo from Chiquita Brands; Timothy Reeder; Andrew Stronge; Heather Bloss.

According to the company’s Web site, the former United Fruit Company was “the first company to brand a banana” by introducing Miss Chiquita in 1944. (Originally she was an animated banana; over time she evolved into the woman in the unlikely fruit-filled hat.) Its use of little blue stickers began in 1963. In retrospect, that was a brilliant way to solve the problem of how to apply some version of branded packaging to an item that literally grows on trees. And emotions aside, I suspect that Andrew Ciafardini, a Chiquita assistant spokesman, hits the right point when he explains that the sticker-redesign campaign was driven in part by the question “How do we leverage the iconic real estate that we already have on all our bananas, throughout the world?”

DJ Neff, the art director of Chiquita’s campaign, made a related observation in an interview with Design:Related. “The great thing about looking hard at something the brand already owns, no matter how small, is that there is usually a cultural recognition there already,” he said. “With some application of this value to an idea you have, it creates a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic, therefore creating intrigue in the viewer — much like pop art does.”

A big part of being “pop” anything these days is prodding the masses to participate directly; hence the contest. The hundreds of designs submitted — interestingly, contestants were asked to not riff on Miss Chiquita herself — take the sticker image into a huge variety of new graphic directions. By actually contributing to the defamiliarizing of something familiar, the contestants layer new “intrigue” onto one company’s supply of what is, after all, a pure commodity.

Ciafardini says Chiquita is particularly interested in communicating to the under-25 crowd that the company offers the “convenient healthy snacking platforms that people are looking for these days.” (I believe that means bananas.) “You know,” he continued, “people want to be able to find a banana in the supermarket so they can eat healthy instead of picking up a candy bar.”