Packaging innovation lessons we can learn from “Glad Wrap”

This morning, on the way to dropping the kids to school, one of the commercials on the radio was for “Glad Wrap”. They were announcing that they had given consumers what they wanted and reverted back to the “old packaging”.

For anyone not in Australia, this is one of the many articles covering the story of how consumers were less than thrilled with the recent packaging changes.

So after investing in the development and launch of the new packaging, Clorox (who make Glad Wrap) are now investing in promoting the old packaging in an attempt to claw back the lost market share.

At the first sign of problems with the new packaging, Clorox announced that “market research” had indicated that consumers would love the new packaging change.

While I have no idea what methodologies this involved, it highlights a fundamental problem with a lot of product and packaging testing. The objective of “market research” for new product and packaging is often to provide something to point at if the plan fails, rather than uncover the real consumer experience.

Many of the worlds’ largest brands are now adopting a very simple solution that dramatically reduces risk.

If in addition to any quantitative testing, the entire project and leadership team observe the real experience of consumers in the natural environment and time of consumption, they will observe potential problems themselves.

And won’t have to suffer any arguments against.

Who’s going to argue with a horse’s mouth?

These will not be “statistically valid”.

Or something you can try to save your career with if it all goes belly up.

It will however get your entire business closer to the real experience of your consumers, in a way that is much harder to ignore than a graph.

Yesterday one of our Thinkers uploaded the video below about her experience with the packaging on a new Oral B product.

We receive numerous videos like this every week and each one makes me wonder what the “Market Research” said about them, prior to the launch?

(Thanks Sarah for the permission to publish.)