Packaging Fail

A Package Must Perform for The Consumer, Or It Risks Failure.

By: Elisabeth Cuneo

As a consumer, have you ever experienced a packaging fail? I have just recently and it has inspired me to write this blog. Now, I don’t want to name names because I have tremendous respect for this company, so I won’t. I have been using a particular brand of shaving cream for years, let’s call it brand A. I got hooked on it after my mom picked one up for me on a whim. She bought it because the packaging was so lovely. I fell in love with it because of the intuitive design and user-friendliness. I have since bought many containers of brand A, and everything was going smooth (no pun intended) with the product until the most recent one I purchased. There is something wrong with it! The most important function of the package, the pump, doesn’t work! Each time I push down on the pump, the pump head gets stuck in the down position so then when I need another pump, I have to pull up hard on the pump head and re-adjust it to then pump down again. But then, the pump amount is never a full pump, leaving me needing even more and starting the vicious cycle over again.

As silly as this may sound, it is so frustrating to me! It makes using the product nearly impossible. It takes too much tinkering to make the package work to even bother with it. In fact, I just went out and purchased a competitor’s product and threw this one away. I didn’t even want to buy another brand A because I did not want to risk buying one that may also be defective. This is a true packaging fail. Brand A has lost a customer, even though I know it isn’t their fault, per say, but I cannot handle the annoyance of the product. The fail renders it completely unusable.

Have you ever experienced a packaging fail? What was it, and what happened? This one is just an example of a household annoyance, but sometimes a packaging fail can mean life or death when talking about a medical supply item, or pharmaceutical drug. Come to think about it, I actually have an inhaler package that has failed to work…

Packaging is obviously so important to a brand and its functionality. The product inside should be great too, don’t get me wrong, but without a proper functioning package, the entire product is unusable.