The Importance of Packaging

The last time I went grocery shopping I bought a new type of muesli. I wasn’t shopping for cereal. I was crossing through the cereal aisle and this series of unusual boxes caught my eye. The boxes are each roughly the size and shape of a Kleenex box, have a matte finish and die cuts on the front and side that show you the real cereal inside (not an enlarged idealized photograph of the cereal as with most boxes). The cereal is made by Dorset Cereals, and the product lives up to the packaging.

But it’s the packaging that really delighted me. I bought the product for the packaging—I admit I’m always looking for a good muesli, but I wasn’t looking for one that day.

The copywriting on the box perfectly complements the design. Take the weight, for example, which is labelled as “750g of unadulterated breakfast pleasure.” Cute, whimsical, without being cliché or saccharine. Something about the writing combined with the window into the contents convinced me that the packaging was sincere, that this company cared as much about making a good breakfast cereal as I cared about eating one.

I wish more companies paid as much attention to their packaging. The author of the Desi Geek blog writes about the packaging Seagate uses for the Simple Drive external hard drive. I bought a Simple Drive after reading this blog, again largely for the packaging. So far it’s been a great piece of hardware, but I was more impressed with the attention to detail in the packaging. One detail the author doesn’t mention is that the stickers used to close the various bags inside the box all have the word “hello” printed on them. It made the process of unpacking an otherwise utilitarian device enjoyable, like finding a note in your lunch from your spouse wishing you a good day.

Is buying products because you like their packaging stupid? Tyler Cowen is trying an experiment with books, buying books where the cover appeals to him without reading anything about the book. So far it’s working. His theory is that professionals who design the covers put a lot of effort into making the cover appeal to the people most likely to enjoy the book, so if we pick a book with a cover we like, we’ll tend to like the book, not because there’s a necessary connection between a book and its cover, but because there are teams of people working very hard to ensure such a connection exists. Why not trust them?

Maybe it’s the same with the cereal. On the other hand, maybe the packaging actually improves my experience of the product. Think about it however you like; maybe it puts me in a good mood when I pour the cereal into my bowl, or maybe it creates the right frame for the experience (they say you get what you expect out of something and here the packaging sets a good expectation). I’ve heard that experiments show that food actually tastes different depending on the packaging it comes out of, but I’ve never actually seen the evidence. In any case, the packaging seems likely to influence my subjective experience of the product, so I’ll think the product is good whether it is or not.

Then again, maybe that subjective evaluation is all there is. If so, if there’s no objectively good cereal, then the packaging might have as much an impact on the taste as the ingredients do.

The same could be true of books: the book’s cover and other features (its binding quality, typeface, margin sizes, etc.) might affect your perception of the book, the way attractive people sound more interesting even when they’re saying something mundane.

Is more choice better?

I recently read the excellent Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz. Schwartz argues persuasively how a world with 29 different types of pasta sauce to choose from leads to anxiety, depression, and other problems. After reading the book, I began to think that happiness depended on reducing the number of options before us, either as a society or artificially as an individual.

Then I encountered Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk about Howard Moskowitz, in which he argues, also persuasively, that having 29 types of pasta sauce to choose from has been one of the greatest contributions toward our happiness in the last few years.

So on the one hand, more pasta sauce causes anxiety and depression; on the other, it makes us happier.

Either one of them is wrong, or there’s a way to reconcile these views. I’ve been trying to reconcile them, and this is what I’ve got.

I think what Gladwell observes is that we now have enough types of pasta sauce to please everyone’s taste­—if you can figure out which one you like best. What Schwartz observes is that figuring out which one you like best is exhausting, especially when pasta sauce is only one of 20 items on your grocery list, and grocery shopping is only one of your weekend chores.

Gladwell’s talk is a good tonic for the nostalgia lurking in the background of the Paradox of Choice. There are passages where Schwartz seems to long for the good old days of a more restrictive society where someone else decided what sort of sauce tasted good enough and you just bought the only one that was available.

On the other hand, Schwartz’s discussion of opportunity cost illustrates the negative consequences of the increased choice that Gladwell celebrates. The basic idea is this: If I really like chunky mushroom pasta sauce but I also like four cheese and spinach pasta sauce almost as well, then I’m robbed of some of my enjoyment of chunky mushroom because I know I’m not eating four cheese and spinach, and I know that would have been a good experience, and in a way I’m paying the cost of not eating it. In other words, the value to me of the best option is only as good as the difference between that and the second best option, which might be quite small. Plus I have the added stress of repeatedly making these kinds of choices.