Thursday, May 15, 2008

Retail Packaging

Seth Godin's post today on retail packaging is right on the money. Having lived in this world for several years, he is speaking the exact truth:
[Bad] packaging is the result of a paranoid retail buyer (the person who orders in bulk for the store, not the buyer at retail) demanding pilfer-proof packaging combined with a lazy brand manager choosing a lousy solution to the challenge presented by getting it into a retailer. "Make it pilfer-proof or we won't carry it," he says. The brand manager doesn't want to take a risk, so she packages it the way they packaged it when the device cost $1,000. Impregnable.
The online thing I would change here is that it's not always a "lazy brand manager" but sometimes a business that can't afford to loose a major channel and has to bend to the retail buyer's whims. I've lived this and that's how it works sometimes. If you want to stay on the shelf you have to do what the buyer says.

And as long as I'm writing about Seth's post, here's my plea to Seth: Open up comments on your blog! Please! You preach about social conversations and about customer/company interactions but don't open up your own blog for public discussion. I just don't get it.

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