The Consumption Circle

A consumer’s interaction with a packaged product, especially in the fast moving food categories is more prolonged than many in the industry would take for granted.

As a result, companies design their packaged products for a single consumer touch-point, like POP stand-out, or visual appeal, or branding. In the consumer centric innovation model that we use, the product journey for a packaged food product goes through the following steps:
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Blister packs are ubiquitous these days, packing products from mints to headsets.  Initial applications for items such as pills and mints generated little usability complaints and issues from consumers. However, the transition over the last decade(s) to pack electronics and similar higher value products in clamshell packages to control inventory shrinkage in the retail sector has certainly produced more than its share of usability issues, and consumer push-back.

Internet retailer behemoths like Amazon, who do not have brick-and-mortar store fronts, are now pushing back on the need to have tamper-proof blister-packs.  Amazon is leading the forefront with their frustration-free package initiative.  A silent revolution has started to ease the usability of these packages while retaining some of the tamper-proof features of the packages for keeping inventory shrinkage under control.

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Today, we have migrated from Typo web engine to WordPress due to its better ability to integrate with plug architecture and availability of a wide variety of plug-ins, including ones we would like to use for consumer feedback on package usability.  There are some aesthetic differences between the two set-ups which we will address in the next days.

As the upward trend of consumers’ personal weight in developed countries steadily increases, consumers are getting progressively more concerned about high-calorie, high-portion size drinks. They are also concerned about their general health, creating an interest for wholesome foods from far-away and ethnic places. These two trends have caused interesting responses from food conglomerates and soft drink manufacturers.

Smaller Portions

This is one of the underlying trends for manufacturers to move towards smaller packages while luring consumers with highly attractive packages like aluminum bottles. Obviously, package attractiveness is a major factor especially in soft drinks as it drives sales at POP. As Coke painfully found out in the mid-80’s with its disastrous introduction of the New Coke, soft drink purchases are not necessarily driven by taste, but by strong branding. More expensive package formats, like aluminum bottles are especially advantageous for brands that are package design focused. Of course, Coke is the leading example of that.

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Heinz refreshes its ketchup package after 42 years

On Feb 4th, Heinz released its new ketchup package. The announcement, to the surprise of many, made the major news publications, including the Wall Street Journal.

In their press release, Heinz gives us the drivers behind the design, specifically to be able to cater to the needs of squeezers and dippers. They are clearly trying to address occasion driven consumer needs through package innovation centered around package usability.

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½-Gallon Milk Carton Benchmark

We are going to be venturing into assessing a number of carton package products on the market soon, and we wanted to establish our benchmark first. We do believe that gable-top packages are indeed the benchmark for carton family-packs on the market, which typically pack milk and juice. One of the mainstream packages in the North American markets is the ½-gallon carton that has evolved over the years to have progressively better openings. These packages are not aseptic, and therefore they are suitable for normal [fresh] shelf life products.

This package, as well as others like it, has a two-step opening, where the consumer first removes the cap [first step], and then a pull-ring [second step]. We do believe that two-step openings for family size packages (as opposed to on-the-go packages) are better, since the two-step opening delivers an added peace-of-mind. We favor them as long as the usability of the pull-ring is acceptable.

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In this first article of a proposed series of death-matches, we will be looking at good and bad examples of everyday packages from the marketplace, and comparing them using our metrics that we have developed over the years. As usual, packages being low involvement products, we, as packaging professionals, naturally see a lot more detail than regular consumers might see. At the same time, the perspectives that we are putting forward here stem from thousands of hours of packaging research we have done with consumers around the world, often in observation rooms.

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Here is another aluminum can design that stands out among the ones we have seen lately. This design adds no new functionality, or tangible consumer value, apart from some potential branding opportunity. However, we do believe that even in that area, this design is rather limited.

The idea here is to use a process called impact extrusion to make many flat surfaces on an otherwise round package.

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We have seen a number of aluminum can concepts lately. Some of these are attractive designs with consumer appeal. They do, however, add no new functionality, or tangible consumer value, apart from branding opportunities. We do believe in sensory appeal, and its positive impact on consumer perception especially at POP.

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The 360 Paper Bottle is one of the more refined pulp based concepts that we have seen. Concepts like the 360 Paper Bottle certainly have sex-appeal, driven by their strong environmental image.

Here at PackageRepublic.com, we wanted take the 360 bottle, and using it as a proxy to evaluate the uphill battle these concepts will face in the future. For this assessment, we engaged our unique assessment toolchest.

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