I’ve thrown some frozen tilapia in with the chicken before. Hard to say whether he liked it any more than plain chicken, but I’ll just assume that he did. I should do that more often, actually. (Of course, I need to feed the humans more fish as well, while I’m at it.)
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Do that! Humans love Tilapia. Here I can get my own live and the fish-market-clerks turn them into spine-less fillets while I buy the rest of my groceries.
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.
Oddly absent from the Collector’s Weekly article is the label that the author of the books says is what got him into collecting these labels to begin with. There’s a paragraph of text on it, but they opted not to provide a picture for some reason!
I found it elsewhere because I was curious, so here it is:
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Well, I am a graphic designer myself and I´ve been known to call myself a trained Photoshop monkey at those times when I have absolutely no say in the turds I´m forced to produce. Calling myself an Illustrator monkey wouldn´t have the same ring to it and none of those marketing fuckers know any graphics applications besides Photoshop anyway.
Marketing studies are bullshit anyway, I sure as hell know which of those two cans I would buy based on the package design alone.
Of course, you’re a special case because you’re a graphic designer, and you care about such things. The average supermarket shopper just does not give a fig about graphic design, or fonts, or any of the things that the internet gets up in arms about (see also: the vast overuse of comic sans).
They may not care, and they may not be able to tell why, but they still perceive the differences. It’s just like with audio: I can play ten people two versions of a song, one unaltered, and one that’s been slightly clipped by poor gain staging, and at least nine of them will prefer the unaltered version even if they can’t put their finger on quite why.
Whether it´s design, music, other arts or even politics, economy and the environment, the average person probably doesn´t actively care about it, right until the point when their house has been destroyed by a hurricane and nobody´s coming to help, they are diagnosed with cancer and can´t get treatment, and to top it off, everything around them looks and sounds like shitty corporate pap. So you´re right, the average person doesn´t give a fuck and that´s why I´m getting out of this business soon. Talk about pearls before swine.
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