by Mark Hurst
Packaging and the customer experience
February 19, 2010 in Usability by Mark Hurst
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.
