An old boss of mine challenged me as to the effectiveness of packaging.
“I could put this product into paper bags and it would still sell” he declaimed.My eager heart raced as the opportunity to stand up to this ignorant ogre presented itself. I found myself upright, the chrome legs of the cheap leather chair scraping quickly backwards.
“But only to perverts” I announced before reclaiming my seat and rejoining the meeting. My last statement in the matter was a little more humble as realisation welled up.
“However, there are an awful lot of those about to sell to.”
Of course, a product sold in a paper bag is bound to attract attention but I got his point. He felt that going to any trouble (and for trouble, read “expense”) with pack design was a waste of time (and for time, read “expense”). For him it came down to the desirability of a product. If people were queuing up around the corner because your product had all the hype or all the originality then who cared how the pack looked?
So does good design only matter when the product is either poor or has to compete against similar products? This has to be one of those posts where the answer can only be no. As designers we are preconditioned to believed that good design matters. But what do you think? And how do we even set about showing design effectiveness? Is this a case of proving a negative? Unless two designs (one “poor” and one “good” are launched into the market with the same spend then how do we disentangle the many elements of marketing to discover where effectiveness lies?
