The Can’s the Thing : How consumers have been romanced by powerful brands and persuasive boxes : THE TOTAL PACKAGE: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, <i> By Thomas Hine (Little, Brown: $24.95; 304 pp.)</i>

For his debut exhibition in 1962, Andy Warhol lined Los Angeles’ Ferus gallery with 32 paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans, a number determined not by aesthetic necessity, but by the number of available flavors. Warhol’s wry repetition called attention to the iconic status of this humble container, as well as the absurdity of our culture of packaging. A symbol of maternal love rendered immaculate by its sterilized can, Campbell’s Soup, Warhol implied, was the Virgin Mary of our secular times.

In a society where many of us don’t know our neighbors, let alone the clerks at the local supermarket, brand names are familiar faces, and whether we begin the day by drinking President’s choice with our Aunt Jemima pancakes, or by ingesting the probity of Special K, we are constantly consuming not only products, but carefully designed relationships. Thomas Hine’s “The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes,” dutifully examines the history behind this state of affairs, and suggests that we may be able to learn more about our civilization from containers than from works of art.

An architectural and design critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of “Populuxe,” Hine approaches--one could even say, packages--his subject with a mix of scholarship and almost “boosterish” enthusiasm. It’s a potentially dangerous combination: Hine spends more time than he might have, for instance, in a somewhat pedestrian account tracing the technological development of physical containers, from 5,000-year-old Iranian wine jars to six-packs of Bud. Far more intriguing are the chapters which probe the history of packaging, a distinctly modern from of voodoo with roots that stretch back to the marketing of patent medicines in Puritan England. The ubiquitous phenomenon we know today, however, only began in earnest during the last century, when products like Borden’s condensed milk and Quaker Oats convinced a newly urbanized population that sealed goods were more trustworthy than those sold out of barrels at the corner grocery.

From the start, brand name products offered not only a guarantee of quality, but incarnated charismatic values as well. “The way to spur consumption of material goods was to dematerialize them,” Hine observes; hence Quaker Oats was not merely a breakfast cereal, but a symbol of wholesome purity, while Borden’s offered an image of nature improved upon by industrial hygiene. Seeking to convey an inviolate presence in an imperfect world, many packages evoked an almost religious aura; Nabisco’s orb and cross logo had earlier in history been a symbol of Christ’s redemption of the world.

Though Hine doesn’t mention any record of healing powers being attributed to cookie boxes, he does cover the curious psychology underlying our relationship to “persuasive containers.” In a series of classic experiments in the 1930s, marketing guru Louis Cheskin demonstrated that package design actually altered the way test subjects experienced the taste of the beer or crackers they sampled. With a nod to Freud, he called the phenomenon “sensation transference,” and provided the packaging industry with a sense of legitimacy. Beauty may be only skin deep, but a clever container could change our perception of the world.

Cheskin’s discovery, which hints that mind and body are not as separate as we usually assume, suggests something akin to the placebo phenomenon; as Hine notes in his discussion of patent medicines, packaging “can have such profound psychological effect it can make the medicine work.” In the ultimate spin on Cheskin’s findings, a leading package design firm recently offered to devise “trade dress” for products that don’t yet exist--the idea being that, in a marketplace where 90% of new products fail, companies should be sure they have a winning container before developing the mere contents that go with it.

“The Total Package” includes a small treasury of similarly revealing tales of the trade, yet all too often Hine fails to elaborate on the more intriguing questions raised by his research. When he asks early on, “Why do Japanese consumers prefer packages that contain two tennis balls and view the standard U.S. pack of three to be cheap and undesirable?” we’re led to expect a fascinating detour into cultural anthropology, but like his subject, Hine focuses on the surface.

His book is liveliest when charting specific case histories, such as the famous 1955 Marlboro redesign that transformed an obscure brand geared to women smokers into a rugged icon of flip-top machismo, which went on to become the world’s most lucrative brand name. Also of interest are anecdotes describing work by legendary marketing consultants such as Stan Gross, who asks his test subjects to describe products as if they were people. (One familiar brand of detergent tested as “a real slut,” who “promised too much to too many people,” while Tide was compared to Sylvester Stallone--a little crass, but it gets the job done).

When offering his own readings of container design, Hine sometimes comes across as a test subject in a one-man experiment. Commenting on a 1950s Secret deodorant package that featured a white triangle on a cellophane-wrapped box, he solemnly intones that “its combination of revelation and concealment . . . appealed to voyeuristic impulses and hinted at Cold War anxieties about national security.” Yet Hine’s own anxieties, as he explains in an oddly confessional afterword, lie closer to home: after describing his mother’s obsessive reliance on packaged foods following an operation, he notes that though he felt “replaced” (his own offers of home-cooked meals were rebuffed), “a frozen product . . . was not as difficult to live with as I am. . . . And the package was predictable in a way that I was not.” Despite his lingering uneasiness, Hine concludes, “I can only be grateful to live in a world of packages,” presumably because it frees us from inconvenient social relationships.

Rarely pausing to probe the downside of our relentlessly packaged culture, Hine’s book is plainly the work of an admirer, and this is its chief limitation: It gives us a history of packaging from the package’s point of view.