TechnoBrands

This will be brief. I had a great Christmas (my 23 year old son came home for a few days which was great, and we had snow, which is unusual on the wet coast). We had the whole clan – both sets of grandparents, all the kids and the dog at our house on Christmas Day. It was nice.

I got lots of great things for Christmas, although we are seriously winding down on “things” as presents and tending to give more relational and “gifting” gifts (like “special time with one of the girls”, World Vision donations and Kiva gift certificates).

With regard to the material things I was given, there were a number of shirts, a digital camera, socks, and a few winning lottery tickets (courtesy of my lovely wife). I’m not complaining, but I want to make a comment here about packaging. Even with the small number of materials things that were exchanged in our home on Christmas morning, we managed to fill 2 large garbage bags with paper and packing material. Honestly, some of the packing materials are application-specific things that are crafted to hold a shirt in its shape, or to suit a particular model of flashlight so that it is displayed nicely and is guaranteed to challenge bare hands and fingernails to free it from its confines. Last Christmas I received a very cool blister pack cutter that arrived in my stocking and which was excellent for dispatching even the most formidable blister packs. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it this year (one of Santa’s elves must have absconded with it in a fit of jealousy), so I was back to hacking at blister packs with a pair of scissors and trying not to gore myself or accidentally scar the thing of value I was setting free.

As an example, consider one shirt: 3 tags (carefully branded and bearing a marketing message which went straight into the garbage), a stiff cardboard form (approx. 20 cm by 40 cm), a plastic form inside the shirt collar, a cardboard form outside the shirt collar with a plastic tip glued on each end, 8 metal “clasps” and 6 pins. Note to product managers that are thinking of packaging: where is there value in the packaging that you plan to use? Does the packaging add to the user experience? Is it a nuisance that the unpacker will need to deal with or is it easy to recycle? This is something you really need to think about – the promise you are making to anyone that has purchased your product starts with the unpackaging experience. Is the unpacker thinking “wow, there sure is a lot of needless crap here, what a pain in the neck” or are they thinking “cool, everything is easily recycled – the unpacking experience holds hope that the product itself will meet high expectations”. Are they going to get an impression that you care about the environment? Or will they think that you pay lip service to being green, but demonstrate something quite the opposite through your package design?