All projects: Gel, Jobs, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Blog, Bit Literacy
Packaging and the customer experience
Fun with packaging. Which of these brands is truly trying to improve the customer experience?
• Cigarette makers change their packaging to satisfy a new law against selling "light" brands - but the colors of the packaging still signal the same old ruse: NYT story
• Campbell's uses neuromarketing to create packaging that sells more cans of soup. They're not actually improving the soup, just tweaking the packaging: WSJ story
• Tropicana halted a redesign of its orange juice packaging because it made the varieties much harder to distinguish: Khoi's roundup (from 2009). See also Jamy Ian Swiss's Gel Video which touched on the same topic.
• See also this post on Pirate's Booty packaging.
Packaging is by definition a separate part of the experience from the product inside, be it poison, soup, orange juice, or snack chemicals. And to some extent the packaging has to use metaphor, or fantasy, perhaps even deception, to sell the product. But even deception can be a good thing (see Deception considered helpful). It all depends on what your longer-term aim is... or what the long-term effects of the product are.
Is this a trick questions? :-)
I'm going to go with the Cigarette's and Tropicana.
The cigarette sellers are just trying to help their current light users know what to buy once they switch names, right?
With the Tropicana, they kept the screw top lid, which is a little easier with the orange texture and size.
i am a pharmacist. my patients recieve their medications in vials with my pharmacy label. NEVER do they get them in original packaging - the only ones who see original packaging are the people that work in the pharmacy. Yet, Pfizer thinks their Lipitor bottles are not broken even though the size of Lipitor 20mg is the SAME SIZE as the opening of the bottle. this is among the top 10 drugs in every country in every pharmacy. we comment on how broken this is EVERY time we see it, about 50 times per shift.