It’s no longer enough to have a great brand name, product, package design
or labeling; brands have to add the dispensing experience into the mix to
keep customers...
“It’s a global economy that we work within, and anyone can
get into these marketplaces,” said Andrew Hurley, Associate
Professor at Clemson University, where he teaches product
design and package development.
“These marketplaces aren’t truly curated as they were traditionally.
Now anyone can just join in.”
To stay loyal, consumers have to have a memorable dispensing
experience. A beautiful package, product or gee-whiz
marketing is not enough to hold them.
Everything has become linked
Stephan Ballot, VP of FLOCON, Inc., maker of fine mist
spray pumps, sums it up this way, “The dispensing device is
the product is the brand. The brand is what makes someone
remember the product. The chemistry of the fluid inside is
what does the work for the end-user, but then the dispensing
device is what delivers. If something can’t deliver that chemistry,
the job doesn’t get done.”
More than consumers are noticing the spraying experience.
Heavy.com, a lifestyle website, recently reviewed makeup setting
sprays. The spray pump was one of the judging criteria. Some
of the critiques ranged from “sprayer doesn’t produce a fine
enough mist” to “spray may be splotchy.”
The article’s author, Jeanna Hofmeister, tests at least 100
fine-mist-sprayer-topped products each year.
“One of the things that made me address mist sprayers for
that article was because it was about facial sprays,” Hofmeister
noted. “When you wear makeup, you don’t want large wet
drops on your face or it wrecks the effort you put into your
makeup. So sprayers that delivered anything less than a fine
mist needed to be called out,” she said.
“It’s the world we live in now. Everything has changed,”
Palmer added.
Avoiding “Anticippointment”
“I think in the past, dispensers may have been viewed as a commodity,”
said Tom Newmaster, partner at FORCE, a package
design and branding firm in Lancaster, PA.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Palmer, who thinks many brands
fall into the trap of trading in dispenser quality to mitigate
costs.
“In the short-term, that might seem favorable, but if the
user experience is lacking, repeat sales will suffer,” he said.
“All brands are interested in their equity,” explained Hurley.
“That’s the most important thing to them. Every little aspect
of the package, from the unboxing experience to the surface
finish to the print quality to every little detail adds to their
equity. If it exceeds expectations, there’s that warm and fuzzy
feeling. Every little thing that detracts or doesn’t meet those
expectations is counter to that. It puts that cold and prickly
feeling into that perceived value of the brand.
“Can one aspect of it reroute the consumer to move on and
switch brands? Yes, but I think that in aggregate it’s important
to understand that every component is part of the larger pic-
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