| Joined: | Wed Apr 18th, 2012 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 4186 |
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You are probably right Eric. Not having been in the business world I am often taken aback by what corporate America does but I was looking for better out of the Japanese.
In America, I think most of the corporate budget is used for advertising with a small fraction on the sub par product manufactured.
As a side note, not too long ago the manufacturer of my favorite cracker changed the box from a regular cereal type box to one I can not describe. It would not stack on the grocer shelves, nor in my pantry and it was just baffling to me what genius thought this up. For the first time in my life I sat down and wrote a letter to a company letting them know what I thought. A few weeks later I received some coupons and a letter in the mail. They were sorry I was not pleased but no one else had a problem so shut up and just be happy we will sell you the crackers. Well, low and behold, two weeks ago I was shopping and went to reach for my crackers and they were back in the original box. Not sure this story has any significance but there must have been more folks than myself who hated the box and they changed it back. Maybe we are not letting our displeasure with a product get to the manufacturer before we just switch and they don't know why?
Maybe I am just showing my age and I am sick and tired of "multitasking" or doesn't do anything well just a bunch of things mediocre.
Wore myself out and need my afternoon nap now. then maybe a beverage and some of my reborn crackers and cheese.
Very good tale.
These sort of packaging gaffs are quite common. I worked for some years for a major food manufacturer who also have a Petfoods division.
We had a really good packaging designer, and John would mockup every new concept and do all sorts of stack and transit trials. It was quite interesting to watch him in action. He used to have a phrase when other people didn't do things correctly "it's an absolute indictment!" he would exclaim. Having a slight lisp and higher pitch voice always seemed to add more venom and impact!
But I digress...
Our Petfoods division came up with a new dog food called flick. It went right through testing and packaging design of sorts...into production with supposedly the required attention to detail.
It was not until the marketing guys got a call to come to the warehouse anyone knew there was an issue with the packaging design.
They had used capital letters on the labels...and there were pallet after pallet, floor to ceiling, proudly displaying FLICK (squint and condense the letters!!!)
Needless to say the packaing was scrapped.
"It's an absolute indictment!" exclaimed John.
Last edited on Wed Jul 18th, 2012 12:50 by Eric
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Eric