A Mexican dairy brand just pulled off something most global brands wouldn't dare — they put someone else's leftovers on their packaging. It might be the smartest piece of branding I've seen this year, and it didn't require a rebrand, a new agency, or a single page of brand guidelines.
What happened
Lala, one of Mexico's biggest dairy brands, released limited-edition packaging that acknowledges a long-standing cultural phenomenon: millions of Mexican households reuse Lala containers to store leftover food. Rice, salsa, beans — anything but the dairy product that originally came in the tub.
Rather than ignoring this — or worse, treating it as off-brand — Lala designed packaging that celebrates the behaviour. It went viral almost immediately.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the branding spectrum, Coca-Cola's recent rebrand continues to cause confusion three months in. The streamlined packaging — designed for visual cohesion across the product range — is making it harder for shoppers to tell Coke Original, Diet, and Zero Sugar apart on the shelf. People are grabbing the wrong can. The complaints haven't gone away.
Two packaging stories. Opposite approaches. One brand watched what people actually do. The other designed for how things should look.
The bigger picture
There's a tension here that every designer deals with, whether you're working on packaging, interfaces, or brand systems.
We spend enormous energy designing for intended behaviour. Brand guidelines, interaction patterns, user flows — they're all built around how things should be used. That's fine, as far as it goes. But the most interesting design opportunities often live in the gap between intended use and actual use.
Lala's containers weren't designed to store arroz con pollo. But that's what they became — across an entire country, for decades. The brand could have kept ignoring this. When they finally designed for that behaviour instead of pretending it didn't exist, the response was instant and enthusiastic. People felt seen.
Coca-Cola went the other direction. The rebrand prioritised a unified visual identity — the kind of thing that looks stunning in a brand deck, on an Instagram grid, in a design awards submission. But it appears to have underweighted the actual moment of truth: a distracted shopper, fluorescent lighting, three seconds to grab the right can. In that context, "visual cohesion" stops being a feature and starts being a problem.
This is a mistake I see in digital design all the time. We optimise for the screenshot, the portfolio piece, the Dribbble shot. We design for how things look when they're standing still. But people don't experience design standing still — they experience it while they're busy doing something else entirely.
Why this matters more than ever
Here's what makes this especially relevant right now. We're in a moment where AI tools can generate hundreds of packaging concepts, logo variations, and brand systems in minutes. The bottleneck is no longer production — it's insight.
AI can help you iterate visually. What it can't do is sit in a Mexican kitchen and notice that every family keeps their rice in a Lala tub. That observation — that human, contextual, slightly absurd insight — is what made the whole campaign work.
The Coca-Cola situation is arguably what happens when you optimise for visual systems without grounding them in behavioural reality. Everything is consistent. Everything is cohesive. And nobody can find their Diet Coke.
As our tools get better at generating, the designers who stand out will be the ones who are better at observing. The creative leap in Lala's packaging wasn't the graphic design — it was the decision to acknowledge what was already happening.
Observation before invention
The lesson here isn't "be quirky" or "lean into memes." It's more fundamental than that.
Good design starts with watching. Before you open Figma, before you sketch, before you even write a brief — you need to understand what people are already doing. Not what you want them to do. Not what your personas suggest. What they're actually doing, in the messy, uncontrolled context of real life.
That requires a kind of humility most brand teams struggle with. It means accepting that your users might know your product better than you do. That the "unintended" use case might actually be the defining one. That the best design move isn't always a new idea — sometimes it's just paying attention.
Takeaway
Next time you're starting any design project — packaging, interface, brand system, whatever — resist the urge to open your tools first. Go watch people use the current version. In context. Where the product actually lives.
The insight you're looking for might already be sitting in someone's kitchen.