A close friend of mine is actually a graphic designer (with a good degree and lots of training and experience doing unique and good graphic design)… who works for a design firm whose primary clients are pet food companies.
The stuff she produces is basically equivalent to the modern Friskies design there, but the background is usually a nature scene (a photograph) instead of whatever nonsense that is because the clients are mostly smaller companies who do organic or whatever foods and so want to project a natural image.
Now, it’s obvious by looking at it, and she confirms with stories about the clients, that the client dictates exactly what they want it to look like. I am pretty sure the smaller companies don’t do marketing studies and so on, but they assume that Friskies et al. do - and so if Friskies apparently determined through their studies that this type of design works to sell more, then that’s what the smaller companies do too.
I mean this isn’t news; all of the modern ho-hum design out there exists for the same reasons. But real designers are actually doing most of it (though to say they’re actually allowed to “design” it would be a stretch), not trained photoshop monkeys (who wouldn’t know their way around Illustrator anyway) - much to the designers’ dismay 
My friend would love to be doing designs like the old one there instead (well, not that she actually wants to be working in pet food design, but that’s a separate issue) but no client would approve that today.
As an aside, my cat actually quite likes the turkey & giblets pate pictured there, and doesn’t like almost any other canned food (or most dry foods either), even the other Friskies canned foods that are very similar.
