Students help Spotify to get physical

Digital music provider Spotify has a product that exists purely in the digital sphere. So, if you were to create a physical presence for it, what form would it take?

That’s the challenge students at Berghs School of Communication face today as the SPICE: 14 packaging design competition gets underway. A collaboration between BillerudKorsnäs and Berghs, SPICE stands for Sustainable Packaging & Innovation Communication Event and is aimed at stimulating student creativity and highlighting the growing need for sustainable solutions.

Competing teams of students will today attend a meeting at the BillerudKorsnäs production unit at Skärblacka, near Norrköping, Sweden. They will be given a brief that asks them to design a Spotify "experience" that can be taken on the road and used in promotion. The physical presence that the students create must help Spotify "engage existing users so that they become advocates and drive potential new users".

A promotional film, highlighting the difficulties associated with packaging a digital product has been produced to promote the event. The final of the competition and the announcement of the winner will take place on October 29.

The SPICE competition is now in its fifth year and has grown from being a competition that students at Berghs entered to become an integrated part of the Sustainable Packaging Design course at the school.

Getting Spotify involved has been a major coup for the competition, which is focusing on a digital product for the first time this year.

Spotify Nordic Managing Director Jonathan Forster said his company was delighted to take part. "We get a lot of requests, and the reason we said `yes' to this event was that it felt well organised and planned," he says. "There was also a clear schedule for us to consider."

Forster says, "We want it to be fun for both Spotify and the students, but still be defined so narrowly so that they know what the scope is and what we want to achieve. It'll be exciting to see what kinds of creative solutions the students come up with during the autumn."

Jimmy Nyström, Business Development Director at BillerudKorsnäs and Project Manager for SPICE: 14 says that BillerudKorsnäs likes challenging the conventional and finding new packaging solutions.

"This is the first time we've been involved in packaging an internationally renowned digital brand, which shows that even digital brands need physical packaging to reach their target audience."

"The collaboration with BillerudKorsnäs is in line with the way Berghs structures its full-time courses - reality-based cases supported by specialists with excellent knowledge of the industry," says Pål Pettersson, Head of Graphic Design, Berghs School of Communication.

To see work by the students involved in the project and watch a short film explaining the brief, visit:www.spice14.com

For further information, please contact:

Jimmy Nyström, Business Development Director, BillerudKorsnäs +46 (0)70 383 24 42
jimmy.nystrom@billerudkorsnas.com

Pål Pettersson, Head of Graphic Design, Berghs School of Communication.
+46 (0)70 254 02 39 pal.pettersson@berghs.se