Friday, August 24, 2007

An easy prediction: Product fails due to packaging

Ick! What happened to my water!? Is this some sort of practical joke? Nope - sealed bottle... must have been contaminated and then sat in the hot car for several months and started growing...or... wait... maybe it's actually not water? Maybe it's an actual water-like drinking fluid intentionally colored to look like skunk juice! No way... Is it? It is!! Why didn't I figure that out sooner.... Why was I so quick to judge this poor product as water gone bad? Maybe because it's IN A WATER BOTTLE! What marble head decided to do that - to put a ghastly green tinted, skunked-out-water-looking substance in a container that has become synonymous with bottled spring water? It makes me almost sick just looking at it, how would I ever bring myself to drink it? The failure here, or my prediction of failure - to be fair, is in the packaging only, not in the product. The product could be the absolute best Green Tea drink on this side of the universe, but nobody will ever know. I can only think of a few paths which brought our targeted product manager to the decision to use that water-bottle container:

1 - Mr. Efficient: He saw no need to create a whole new package when they've already got warehouses full of those handy plastic bottles.

2 - Mr. Impatient: He was in a huge hurry after tasting this breakthrough refreshment (from a vat, no doubt, certainly not from the container in question) that he needed the fastest path to market... and was told "we have this warehouse full of containers from the water division..." and took the fast path for fear that competitors might discover green tea as a marketable refreshment (?).

3 - Mr. Wrong: He actually thought that the container itself was the breakthrough. Calling the whole team together one morning, after months of trying to figure out how in the world they were going to unload all this disgusting green tea, and said "I've GOT IT! We'll ship it in water bottles! Water Bottles I tell you!! That will make people think 'Refreshing! Clean! Tasteless!' - Brilliance, I tell you! Brilliance!"...

4 - Mr. Victim: He created the best drink product he possibly could, but has no involvement whatsoever in the packaging decision... his own forehead is red from how hard he slapped it the first time he saw his own product on the shelf.

I can't even bring myself to taste it... so don't ask...
If I turn out to be wrong, and this drink becomes the new Monster Energy drink phenom, I promise to drink a bottle of it.

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