Make Your Package Scream Like a Carnival Barker

Make Your Package Scream Like A Carnival Barker

One of the harsh realities of marketing is that advertising won’t reach all your potential consumers. Even the best, most expensive campaigns only reach up to 70 percent of target consumers. Moreover, many products aren’t good candidates for advertising. The only place where you are absolutely guaranteed the opportunity to speak to consumers about your product is at the point of purchase. If a shopper is standing at the store shelf ready to select an item to buy, and your product is displayed as part of the competitive set, only then do you have a 100 percent chance to communicate why they should buy your brand instead of somebody else’s.

Extra - Extra - Read All About It!!!

Consumers make purchases because they are seeking the benefit the product provides. Obvious, isn’t it? So it follows that the best place to trumpet the benefits of your product is on the front of your packaging. That’s where you tell the consumer that your brand delivers the desired benefit better than all those other Joe-schmo competitive products on the shelf.

More often than not, marketers overlook this apparent no-brainer. They mistakenly assume that consumers know what their product is and what it does, so they just slap the brand name on the label with the required legalese and very little fanfare. Big mistake. Sure, shoppers who have used your brand in the past know what your product does and how to use it, but unless you control 100 percent market share and have no competition, you are losing potential consumers who, for one reason or another, are buying your competitor’s product. These are precisely the folks to whom your packaging should be talking! If a shopper is using your product and likes it, you won’t have to work hard to get him to buy again. Savvy marketers know that the real money lies in attracting new users and stealing competitive share!

Package copy is no time to be shy -- you need to think like a carnival barker. Go take a look at the products in a typical store that are category leaders. Most of them shout to the consumer what benefit the product delivers. A sampling of the front package copy from some powerhouse brands:

Windex Glass Cleaner: More Cleaning Power! Streak-Free Shine with Ammonia D.

Dow Disinfectant Bathroom Cleaner with Scrubbing Bubbles. Removes Soap Scum Easily!

Drano Clog Remover: Opens Drains Fast! Safe for Pipes.

ChapStick Lip Balm: Helps heal and prevent dry, chapped lips.

Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer: Kills 99.99% of Germs Without Water or Towels.

Downy Ultra Care: Helps Keep Clothes Soft and Looking Like New.

Bounty Paper Towels: The Quilted Quicker Picker-Upper.

Kleenex Cold Care Tissues: Softest Tissue Made! Ultra Comfort.

The world’s best marketers are always searching for new ways to create competitive advantage through packaging innovation. Developing packaging that performs better than the competition is a great way to differentiate your product to consumers. Packaging innovations can usually be protected by patents, which provides your consumers with a demonstrable and meaningful reason to purchase your product.

When liquid laundry detergent was first introduced, consumers loved the product and how easily it dissolved in their wash, but they didn’t like the messy bottle caps. The caps were designed for measuring and pouring the detergent into the wash, but when consumers replaced the cap on the bottle, the liquid detergent leaked around the cap edges causing a gooey mess. To solve this problem, the Tide brand team developed an innovative package design for no-spill tops on their liquid Tide bottles. The bottle top was designed to channel the liquid detergent from the cap back into the bottle, leaving the cap edges clean. The Liquid Tide bottle is protected by no fewer than 13 patents, making it difficult for competition to mimic and offers Tide a distinctive long-term competitive advantage.

Why did it take until the mid-2000’s for shampoo brands to start installing the large flat caps so that you can stand your bottle upside-down to get the last 20% of shampoo to come out of the bottle? Seems like a no-brainer. Same with the ketchup bottle.

When you consider these examples, it’s easy to see why they work. The tricky part is developing the packaging strategies in the first place. It is common to become so caught up in the process of choosing colors and fonts, developing labels and solving manufacturing problems that you stop asking the question, how could it be different or better? How does the consumer use my product? How could I make her life easier or more pleasant?

Step back from the creative process, and get functional once in a while. Worry about pull tabs versus screw tops, and whether your product reseals easily. These are the unglamorous steps to successful packaging, yet can lead to huge gains. Think about the re-sealable Oreo Cookie package and how that innovation has made that package much more desirable and functional than any other cookie brand? Do you think it’s helped grow sales? You bet it has.


Eric Dean Schulz

Sr. Lecturer - Marketing

Co-Director of Strategic Marketing & Brand Management

Jon M. Huntsman School of Business

To Sell or Not to Sell

To Sell or Not to Sell

Whether it is selling home automation, pest control or home security, many USU students this summer will be paid on commission. My question is: Why or why not?

Some argue that to pick up and move for the summer is inconvenient, and that they will lose the job they currently have. Others argue that the benefits far out reach the costs. The money they can make in three months can sustain them for the entire school year or pay off their student loans.

I researched around the internet and talked to some friends to find other pros and cons to commission based sales from an employee perspective, and this is what I have found.

Employee Pros

The amount of pay you can receive on commission can be significantly higher than that of a salaried job while requiring the same level of education, experience, and training. According to Vivint.com, a summer sales person can make $20,000 to $30,000 – or more -- per season. There is also the point that the more you sell, the more you make. If you have a knack for sales, you can give yourself a pay bump by simply working as hard as you can. It is all up to you. My brother, Parker, is going to sell home automation in Texas this summer. He believes that since he has no commitments here in Utah, he will be able to work as hard as he can, with little distractions.

Employee Cons

If you don’t produce, you don’t get paid. It’s as simple as that. Vacation time may be treated like a week without pay. To succeed at commission-based work, you have to produce constantly. You cannot coast. If you are not a sales person, then this is definitely not the job for you.

Another cost of doing commissioned based sales, is the lack of professional experience you receive. I recently talked to a guy named Jayd. He has done summer sales for the past four years. Even though the money is great, he admits that all he has on his resume is callused knuckles from knocking on doors.

My Conclusion

It really depends on what kind of a person you are. If you enjoy hard work or love sales, this is your job. If you like to keep to yourself or revel in the security of hourly pay, this is not your job.

In the end, the decision is yours.

--Klydi Heywood

Getting Consumer and Marketplace Insight

Getting Consumer and Marketplace Insight 

I wish I had a dime for every time someone called me up, bursting with excitement, over some brilliant new product idea they just had. Inspiration strikes in some strange and wonderful places; washing the dog, looking for car keys, or flipping the remote.  The thought emerges, “Gee, I wish someone would invent something to make my dog smell better, or find my keys, or keep my remote handy.”  Presto, the idea is hatched, and the product begins to take shape. 

Sometimes the ideas are pretty good, and often the inventor has already dreamed up a catchy name, like “Smooch Your Pooch Sweet Smelling Shampoo.”  But marketing a successful product should never begin with a focus group of one. The problem with many of these homegrown inventions is that the inventor becomes so intoxicated with his idea that he starts building momentum before he tests the concept.  He violates the most important rule of the marketing game:  Honor Thy Consumer.

Everything in marketing begins and ends with the consumer.  Before you can sell your product -- before you even develop a product -- you must understand what the consumer wants, and design your offering to meet his or her needs.  You may want a dog that smells like the Rose Queen, but do other consumers share your desire -- and will they pay for it?  If your product concept is on the mark, then your job is simply finding the best way to communicate that you’ve got the goods consumers want.  It’s a basic concept:  you can’t create a need that isn’t there, and you can’t argue consumers out of what they want.   

Consumer is Key 

Knowing that the consumer is at the heart of every marketing decision, researchers have invented ingenious techniques to get in tune with the consumer.  Consumers have been ambushed, bar coded, spied on, and even hypnotized in the quest for information.  Companies pour millions of dollars into research every year to help them understand what consumers are thinking, and how the marketplace is changing. 

But here’s the big question:  if you are looking at the same studies and doing the same types of research as your key competition, how is it possible that you will gain insights different -- and better -- than theirs?  The answer:  you can’t. 

Creating Intellectual Competitive Advantage 

Top companies understand this fact, and force their marketing personnel to go farther than standard research methodologies to gain broader and deeper consumer understanding.  This is where they create competitive advantage. They teach their marketers how to beat competition at the consumer learning game, where all good marketing begins.   
So how do the top companies get better information than the competition?  By spending millions of dollars, right? Wrong.

Top marketing companies teach their marketing personnel to gain strategic consumer insight through everyday life…watching TV commercials, browsing in stores, and talking with friends and family. 

It sounds too ordinary to be true, doesn’t it? Paying attention in everyday life is nowhere near as exciting as launching a half-million dollar research project, complete with one-way mirrors and hidden video.  But don’t be fooled by the trappings of research.  Top companies know the best way to gain real world experience is in the real world, and they’ve made a science of it. 

The Discipline of Observational Learning 

At Procter & Gamble, the company rule is if you travel to another city, for business or pleasure, you are required to visit at least three stores that carry your brands and competitive brands.  You walk in, look around, analyze the situation, and submit a report of those visits upon your return.  Why?  One reason is to try to pick up any competitive activities or test-market products that may have been slipped into a market, but the primary purpose is to teach the discipline of in-store, walk-around learning.  There isn’t much to inspire new thinking in the typical office cubicle, but a store is filled with a wealth of stimulation to help you develop wonderful new ideas.

Give it a try. Go look for a few new products this weekend and see what you find. 

Eric Dean Schulz

Sr. Lecturer - Marketing

Co-Director of Strategic Marketing & Brand Management

Jon M. Huntsman School of Business

Changing the Arc

As the architects have started plugging our classroom and other needs in the initial concept drawing, they have discovered two big problems: 1) the classrooms don’t fit; and 2) the courtyard between the two buildings becomes too narrow in some places.

If we change the arc of the building a little, we can have the best of both worlds, and I wanted you to see some of the proposals we’ve looked at so far. We are not limited to these four approaches.

The proposal in the upper left corner is our original design after we found how wide it would make the building to put in the classrooms as we originally envisioned them.

Ken Snyder

As you can see, the tweaks don’t change the appearance of Huntsman Hall that much. The view from a helicopter would be different but the way it looks from the ground will probably be very close with any of the options under consideration.

We will settle on a new plan sometime in the next few weeks.

Alumnus races for children with Down syndrome

In July 2007, Brady Murray held his newborn son, Nash, for the first time. Soon after, the doctor told him that Nash had Down syndrome.

“I admit, I was scared,” Murray said. “But with time, fear and worry was replaced by humility and inspiration. I love being around others with Down syndrome. They’re filled with innocence and full of ability, and they have feelings just like you and I.”

Brady Murray

Murray, an alumnus of the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, has been committed to helping those with Down syndrome ever since. He said hundreds of children with Down syndrome live in orphanages and mental institutions, and many are waiting to find a family.

Murray is hoping to share this cause with a much larger audience, as he has entered the “Kona Inspired” contest. If he gets enough votes, he will be selected to race in the 2012 Ironman World Championship. If you are interested in helping Murray out, click on this link, watch Murray’s video, and click “VOTE FOR THIS” to help him out. Each person can vote once per day through the entire month of May.

“It’s for these children that I train,” said Murray, who will race in Ironman St. George on May 5. “It’s for these children that I’ve committed to become an Ironman.”

Switching Sides

Last week I mentioned we are considering a number of tweaks in this building model concept. In the initial model concept, the hallway on the classroom floors of the new building was on the courtyard side of building – as per this drawing:

One of the tweaks we want to implement is to maximize the magnificent view of the south end of the valley. In order to accomplish this, the architects have proposed changing the configuration of the hallway on all of the levels of the new building that are above ground level – in other words, levels two and three. With this revised hallway configuration, the lay-out of these floors would look like this drawing below:

We think this is a great idea and will add significant value to the student experiences in the new building.

- Ken Snyder

And now it’s time to start the tweaks

Have you ever decided to try on a pair of shoes only to discover they were too wide and too short? The area of your footprint and the area inside the shoe may be exactly the same, but that doesn’t help your toes that are jammed against the toe of the shoe.

After our architects finished their latest round of designs, we discovered that not everything will fit exactly the way we were thinking. We can make the building a little wider but eventually the lovey green courtyard between the two buildings would be too tight in some places. Or we can extend the arc of Huntsman Hall but then it would extend so close to J. Hanna Moen Hall that the people who live there might feel that a building was invading their personal space.

Ken Snyder

This is not a setback. It’s a normal part of the process. It’s a time to do some tweaking.

The architects have been sharing with us some different ideas and models to still provide the full program we have planned, a beautiful courtyard, and a design that doesn’t encroach on other buildings. These new proposals might change the look of the building a bit. All of the options we are looking at will still be four stories, and all options still wrap around the foot of the George S. Eccles Business Building. All options will still preserve terrific views of the south end of Cache Valley.

However, by adjusting the arc of the building, our architects have shown us we could create more courtyard space and more breathing room between Huntsman Hall and Moen Hall. We haven’t accepted any of the latest plans but we have found elements of them all that we like. Our architects are working on a new proposal that combines some of the best elements of all the plans. It’s all very doable.

- Ken Snyder