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Customer experience design... through packaging?
Aug 14, 2007
Does Mountain Dew have a "customer experience"? We talk about the customer experience of services (banks, hospitals, stores) and the user experience of websites and other technology... but what's the experience of a packaged consumer product, like a soft drink?
I'd argue that there is indeed an experience, and it occurs in three steps:
1. Buy Me: A successful drink stands out on the store shelf. Here consistency of the visual branding is important, so that the customer recognizes the brand from among the many alternative options; or perhaps the more arresting the visual design, the better. Shelf placement (is it at the customer's eye level?) and distribution (how many other stores is it stocked in?) play a part as well.
2. Pour Me: Many drinks use standard packaging - twist top on an everyday plastic bottle - but a few brands (Pom, Fiji, and others) use visually distinctive packaging, and others have innovative packaging that helps the customer carry or pour the drink more easily, or in new ways.
3. Drink Me: Finally, the taste. In the minds of some consumer goods marketers, their job is done before this step ever occurs... "the brand is the experience," they say. (Consider the old blind taste tests from the 1980s, which appeared to show that Pepsi tasted better than the more popular Coke.) Above all else, consistency is important here - there's no room for innovation to, say, change the taste of Mountain Dew from week to week.
Diligent MBAs will point out that I've missed "Step 0," which is the advertising of the product. The more branding occurs upfront, with the most impressions across the most channels, the better the product does in Step 1.
But those MBAs would be (partially, increasingly) wrong on that point. The world is changing in favor of the actual experience - at the expense of advertising - yes, even in consumer packaged goods.
A few years ago I spotted a telephone-booth ad in midtown Manhattan that was touting instant coffee. "Introducing the great new look of Taster's Choice," it read, finishing with "Pssst... tell a friend." I found the ad so absurd - who would actually tell a friend about some new coffee packaging? - that I wrote a column called Packaging is not customer experience. The "experience" of instant coffee, I said, is about price and taste - and a new logo on a plastic canister does not an experience make.
A slew of comments came back, several disagreeing (they're here) and made the case that packaging is, in some cases, most of the "experience" that the customer is shopping or buying.
Now packaging is an even more immediate issue, according to the New York Times (Product Packages Now Shout to Get Your Attention, August 10). Well-known brands like Kleenex, Coors, Huggies, and Mountain Dew are changing their packaging - not their internal product, like the taste or composition - in an attempt to improve the customer experience:
Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers’ attention.
The shift is mostly because of the rise of the Internet and hundreds of television channels, which mean marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials.
So they are using their bottles, cans, boxes and plastic packs to improve sales by attracting the eyes of consumers, who often make most of their shopping decisions at the last minute while standing in front of store shelves.
So now, what "good experience" practitioners have said for years - advertising is less important than the customer experience - is finally coming to fruition even in old-line consumer products.
Customers have more than enough information (way too much, actually) about products already without having to get hit over the head in ads to learn about them. Telephone booth ads in midtown Manhattan are less and less relevant. (As are the booths themselves, come to think of it.)
- - -
See also:
• Increasing guilt about bottled water
• P.S. One way not to package your product is to say about your mayonnaise, "now has the taste of real mayonnaise".
I think the best experience any of us could have with Mountain Dew is to reduce our consumption of that kind of crap! Great design or no great design, what's inside is still the same: processed sugar water and chemical flavors, trucked all over the country in hundreds of millions of plastic and glass bottles. Drink tap water!!! Okay that's my rant of the day. Cheers to all.
~cj
And sometimes packaging changes can be truly wrong: NexCare, a first-aid bandage line from 3M, just changed from nice sensible cardboard boxes to these vaguely phallic plastic pods. They don't really work that well - hard to close - and now I have these hunks of plastic to toss away rather than some nice recyclable cardboard.
The bandages are great - good sizes and good features. They should appeal to smart people who want a better product than Bandaids. But IMHO they've completely ignored the fact that those same smart people care about recycling.
Following on the preceding comments, there needs to be a Step 4: Dispose of Me. Can I return, re-use or recycle the packaging?
Packaging can be customer experience. We buy our laundry detergent in the ginormous size at a warehouse club. We put it on the shelf above the washer. It comes with a detachable cup that is marked specifically for how much should go in each load. It also has a push button spout that makes it easy to pour without having to pick it up. Much better experience than having to pick up a heavy bottle.
In a related note, I bought some Roundup poison ivy killer this past weekend. In the past when I've purchased lawn chemicals, I didn't have a good way to measure out the 2 ounces needed to mix the right formula. The only way I had to measure was a measuring cup, but we use that in the kitchen. Don't really want Roundup in the brownies, know what I mean? So, I had to measure 2 ounces of water, transfer it to a disposable cup, mark the cup, lose the water and then pour in the chemicals. Basically, this is a long story to say that there was a lot of work to my experience. What I bought this weekend came with a cup that is attached to the bottle. It will only get used for its purpose. No extra mess.
If packaging serves a purpose (and I don't mean advertising), yes, it can contribute to customer experience.
I never got around to submitting this to 'this is broken,' but one of the products I buy every 6 months or so are Noxzema's anti-blemish pads, as I have terribly oily skin. The last few times I've bought them, the packaging has been completely different than the previous time and has had "GREAT NEW LOOK!!!" as a feature on the package. As if the new packaging has improved the product any; to the contrary, it made it harder for me to actually find them to begin with since I didn't know what the hell to look for on the store shelf.
From their website (which is flash-based and thus impossible to share a link to a particular product) it looks like they've redesigned their packaging YET AGAIN, and this time they've also changed the name of the product.
You're still missing an important "step" to this particular experience - "Wear Me". Product packaging is FASHION, at least in the sense that the newest and most in/hip/rad products are displayed by their users as badges of "cool", "rich", "on the cutting edge", "extreme" or other personal brand attribute. A bottle of POM marks you as extremely healthy (antioxidants are cool) and wealthy (not an inexpensive drink). A can of Red Bull or Mountain Dew proves that you are "on the go" and "Xtreme", though these are no longer as cutting-edge as some of the newer and more esoteric "energy" drinks.
Packaging can work exactly like a Nike swoosh, Polo pony, iPhone apple or any other recognizable mark - they allow the user to proclaim something about their personal brand. (Certainly, you're familiar with Tiffany's little blue box?) This part of the overall experience is incredibly powerful as a brand-building testimonial that works very effectively as viral marketing. Packaging should be a key component to any product's experience design.
I love your newsletter and normally am in agreement, but I feel you are bit off on this one.
Prime example for advertising (packaging, signage, etc) as the experience is Apple. There is a consistant feeling that you get from their pieces.
I have never touched an iPhone, but when I first saw the commercial for it, the TV was muted, and I looked up and saw the finger scrolling the iPhone screen and visually walked through the process of using that product. I was amazed and it left me with a feeling of having actually touching the product.
When I walked by the local Apple store, there were the large window displays showing off the iPhone. Again, I experienced the product without ever touching it or going into the store.
I have purchased several Apple products in the past, and the packaging is just pure beauty, and reflects the Apple 'experience' perfectly. It was a pure joy for me to unravel each layer and finally get to the product itself.
Now to be fair, in my examples I have been using a product that is truly innovative (iPhone), and a beverages like Coke remain the same, as they should.
The point being that, the iPhone is a true innovation, but it also needed the advertising/packaging experience wrapped around it. I mean imagine if it came in box with 100 product benefits crammed on it, the store displays were banners with a list of what you can do with it... well you get the idea.
2 points.
1. I think the traction experience has been steadily gaining over the last few years is directly proportional 3things:
a) to how saturated the media is with weak messages
b) how sophisticated we've become as consumers
c) to a general natural/green/healthy zeitgeist
2. Not that they were the first (perfume has done it since the beginning), but wouldn't you say Apple's packaging may have tipped off some of the dinosaur brands to the relationship between packaging and experience?
2 points.
I think the traction experience has been steadily gaining over the last few years is directly proportional to 3 things:
a) how saturated the media is with weak messages
b) how sophisticated we've become as consumers
c) a general natural/green/healthy zeitgeist that's making us think about our choices
2. Not that they were the first (perfume has done it since the beginning), but wouldn't you say Apple's packaging may have tipped off some of the dinosaur brands to the relationship between packaging and experience?
Check out Jolt Cola, in the battery can. It is not just novel, it reinforces the product image.
A note about taste tests: when a person drinks a soda, they don't take a sip and then move on. They typically experience a large quantity of the beverage...which is something most taste tests do not replicate. While Pepsi's taste test may have proved people like a sip of Pepsi better than a sip of Coke, the true test is the experience of an entire can of Pepsi vs. an entire can of Coke...
What about "blog about me" or "post me to your wiki"? A customer experience these days is incomplete without motivating the social networking generation to engage--and propagate message--on their own terms in their own media.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned, what, in my humble opinion, should get the award for ABSOLUTE WORST PACKAGING, drum roll please...
Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.
A large percentage of customers have simply given up on how to open the Chinese puzzle box-like plastic package and have simple resorted to hammers and screwdrivers to get at the little DVD inside.
I actually figured out how to open it after doing some research on the web.
Got to be the most retarded package design to come our from a Fortune 50 company so far.