Products & Packaging: Consumer Functionality

For most consumers the packaging of consumable products is of little interest. It should stay that way. The package becomes quite memorable when sudden failure of the bag scatters your potato chips at your feet rather than the slow opening of the bag seal that you expected. A similar situation occurred recently during some laboratory product testing.

Except for the situation just described, as long as product freshness is maintained the packag­ing is an afterthought. Of course, we like to be able to recognize our favorite products among the myriad of products on today’s store shelves, but the packag­ing is otherwise irrelevant since it is usually disposed when the product is consumed.