Your Packaging has 3 Seconds to Sell, with Michael Keplinger, Founding Partner at Smashbrand

Peter Crosby:

Welcome to unpacking the digital shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.

Peter Crosby:

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. On today's episode, we returned to the place where commerce started a consumer walking through a store, scanning the packaging, looking for what they need or didn't know they needed. In the digital world, there is more space to tell your story, but in store you've got three seconds. Michael Keplinger, a founding partner at Smash Brandand. Join Lauren Livak Gilbert and me to articulate the modern testing strategy to ensure that the packaging creative you craft is truly what will make the sale and how those lessons can be applied across all your channels. Michael, welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to have you on. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on.

Michael Keplinger:

Yes, we're talking about packaging and that is true and dear to my heart, so thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Peter Crosby:

I know we're throwing out the old school, we're going new school with packaging, which I'm so excited about, mean so much of having the physical and the digital shelf kind of merged together. There's so much more to think through so many opportunities for storytelling and for impact, and so I'm really delighted to have you here to talk about that. So you've done packaging with both sides of that equation in mind with a wealth of experience. So tell us, just walk us through what in your mind these days are some of the critical elements of packaging for brands to consider and their process for sort of thinking through all that effectively?

Michael Keplinger:

Yeah, that question can be construed as very tactical and there's some really actually good pointers that I can focus on, but I feel like it's beneficial to maybe just throw out a couple point of views. And I think first of all, shopping in general doesn't matter where you do it, it's very contextualized. So for example, I'm in a retail shelf, I'm in a hurry, I got to get out the door. My context, my mind state is different. I'm in a rush versus say online I'm in the comfort of my home. Maybe I have a bit more time. And then the category too. So am I very familiar with this category or do I need to learn about it or am I so familiar that actually a new groundbreaking product has something to tell me and I'm not as open to it? And even within the stores, whether it's e-commerce or retail, I know for a fact that Costco is very much a discovery store.

Michael Keplinger:

We all weave through those aisles, right? And even though there's so much shelf space, there's actually not that many products on the shelf. So people discover products and their mind state, the way they think about 'em are different than in a grocery store. I'm inundated with so many things. And so I think that that's a really important thing to think about no matter how you're selling. And at the end of the day, most products have multi-channel, right? So they're in store. If you're sold in e-commerce, you probably have a goal of being indoors at some point. And so that's definitely something that we think about. And then also I think a really critical piece is the role of packaging in sale. So in a retail store where we actually do focus most of our attention on, and it's everything, right? If you've got in the grocery store, we all go to the grocery store.

Michael Keplinger:

And for the most part, consumers these days, they're so inundated with ads, they shut 'em out, they're not listening. And so the job of the packaging and that particular shopping experience has to do everything. And for consumers really the package and the product are almost one and the same. It's kind of like the product. The brand is the package and it's your only medium of communication. So when you think about shop packaging and what its role is, I think it doesn't matter how it's sold. And if you really come down to it's the piece is the lead that you can't change in e-commerce and things, you can change your marketing, change your tactics, you can target to specific audiences, but at the end of the day, that package is the product. And so if you start there and you actually really spend a lot of time, then I think you can go a long way of really getting things. So you asked me what really matters there. Of course, in that role of packaging or in that shopping experience, you've got to grab attention, you've got to have a compelling offer. I have to understand what that offer is. And again, thinking about am I super busy or do I have more time? All these things really drive down to the role of the packaging in making that decision ultimately and getting trial.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

And how would you suggest brands approach creating packaging for in-store versus online? Because it's a very different audience to your point, you're in the comfort of your home. Maybe you're scrolling through a lot of products on your phone, but in store you just want to grab a cereal or deodorant or whatever it is. How would you suggest they go about that?

Michael Keplinger:

Yeah, I'm really glad you asked this question actually. Going back to how I started the context of shopping. And so we are able to, as e-commerce marketers actually bring a lot of context. We get to build a story, we get to have more images, we have bullet points, we have all kinds of information. And in a retail shelf you get the context is different, but a lot of it is whatever the consumer shows up within their head, how they're going to judge you. And so the way that I think about this is it's kind of like first principle. So the one thing that if that packaging, let's just say you're multichannel, and if you're not today aspire to be, and when you're in that retail shelf and you have nothing but that packaging to communicate to your consumer, it's your only marketing medium. It is the most important thing.

Michael Keplinger:

So you get that right? And so I think that my recommendation advice to even brands that are more e-commerce centric is to really go back to that first principles and get that right, because I really do believe that whether it's used to the same degree in an e-commerce purchase, it still affects the consumer's experience when they receive the product. And also it makes all of these other elements so much more, I like to call it force multiplier, all your other efforts, those activation things, a small little tick in conversion rate can really have those multiplying effects downstream. So I think, and I'll say also too is if you really go through this process and you try to honestly get it right to get it really, really right that you'll learn a lot of things about where consumers might still have some questions where they need to build more information. And I think that's where e-commerce has an advantage to further strengthen some of these things that maybe are slightly disadvantaged in a retail in such a small front of pack medium.

Peter Crosby:

So Michael, I'd love to dig into a little bit to, you were talking earlier about testing and using data to guide your decisions rather than what I imagine might be some objective teams feeling differently about something. You want to get rid of that and really get some data to help guide what you're doing. And I know you guys focus a lot on how to deliver that data, so I'd love you to dig in maybe with an example of how you use your processes to get that sort of objective data for folks.

Michael Keplinger:

Sure. So the way that we think about it is because this is such a kind of, it all comes together at the end to just like boom, in three to 10 seconds I've got a gut reaction to a yes no decision by a consumer. So to really break that apart, our approach, the way we think about it is to really do just that, to break it apart. And so we'll have a number of tests we'll do. And so we're going to focus on creative. And I'll give you an example first on the creative side of things. So we're going to actually strip away some of a lot of that nuanced language you might see on front of pack. There has to be enough there to create that context on a consumer. I understand. And so I'm going to talk about a new, this is laundry detergent.

Michael Keplinger:

And so this brand, they're in market now I can talk about this earth breeze, our client, and they did really, really well in e-commerce, good store on this. And then target's like, but your package is not ready for the store, the retail shelf. So we approach this. And so first of all, just so everyone understands, this is a new form factor. So earth Breeze has a laundry sheet, so think like a dryer sheet, but instead of it, it goes in the washing machine, it completely dissolves. So there's no plastic, there's no waste. So they have a pretty good position, they call 'em eco sheets. They're positioned for eco-conscious consumers because we all have that vision of a pile of plastic bottles in. So we do some creative and we're like, okay, we understand and we put this into creative and what we learned through this process, you have a strategy like, hey, this is what we stand for.

Michael Keplinger:

They create on it, we think we execute it. We've got a lot of creative that's got plant-based stuff on there. That's what they had in the market today. And what we learned from this testing was that comparing to broad mainstream things, you have consumers that say, I care about the planet, I care about eco, but they don't want the product because they believe that it's not going to be as effective as say, tide or these mainstream things. The funny thing is that actually came because it was plant-based references in the creative, visually speaking, the actual formulation for the product has chemicals, it has strong detergents, it actually works as well. But the consumer just, and there were no words that said to the contrary, but the consumer presumed because of all these green colors and plant-based references that it was plant powered and it didn't work.

Michael Keplinger:

That product, if it would've went to market with that creative would've failed miserably. So the unlock was, oh my gosh, we've got to move away. We need to find a way to say save the planet without it being plants. So we did a whole nother round of creative, another testing, and we moved to blue oceans and it put a turtle in there with all these bubbles and effervescence on there. And so what that creative communicated was, this is effective. And then the words reinforced it and the turtle said, save the planet. And their brain never went to plants and plant powered. So that is something that you can't really understand or learn until you put that creative in front of consumer and you learn how they react to it and then you navigate around that. And so that actually is a huge unlock that only became forward in the creative process that we were able to actually shift and modify and move to a more effective visual creative.

Peter Crosby:

And that really does speak to the difference between online. They didn't need to be that economic economical about how they described their product. They had relatively lots of space to have a bunch of different approaches of describing their product, and the consumer was sort of drawn to the one. But when you just have that, and we use dryer laundry sheets like that, and there's just very little room on the box. So you have one chance to sort of convince people not only to pick your product, but almost to pick your category of products so new. So that's really cool to think of in a few seconds. A consumer is able to give you that feedback.

Michael Keplinger:

And I'll give you one more and it's on the other side. I was talking about deconstructing. If we have time for this, I'll actually focus on the words itself. We have another testing methodology where we do the opposite. We actually strip away all creative and we're focused only on the words. And so again, they have to understand what the product is. And in this case it was kind of a better for you snack. And so the product and the function of it and the strategy and the positioning was this product had only 70 calories. And so you eat it and it fills you up. You feel satiated for a longer amount of time, so you're not back to snacking right away. And the mechanism to do that was high in fiber. Fiber makes you feel good. So in this case, the creative team, and they're putting the words out there high in fiber was kind of a big claim. So we put this in front of consumers, and the way we do it is we kind of break down the key areas of the packaging that we want to test. And we have variations about how it resonates and consumers are kind of giving us insight on that. But then what we also do and how we put it together is actually what are the drivers of purchase that define the category claims or the product differentiators and what is the relative importance of those? And in that list was high in fiber dead last. It doesn't

Peter Crosby:

Sound very delicious, does it? No,

Michael Keplinger:

No, but here's the thing. So high fiber means more than one thing. It means for some people it's like gastrointestinals kind of feeling regular and then which actually has more history for that meaning, and a more modern meaning which actually is coming, but maybe not to the same degree is about that kind of satiation how they wanted to use it. And so what we learned in that process, so if we led with that, now imagine this is on the creative and you've got all these things here and that's on the shelf. The consumer sees that. And again, our consumers are fickle. They'll give you three seconds, you're hoping for four, and they're basically like a go no go. And they give it a no no-go because that's not what they're interested in. They don't want fiber. That's not what they're looking for in a snack.

Michael Keplinger:

So the unlock was that the benefit really was satiation with low calories, so fill you up without. And so the fiber was not a purchase driver, but what it was was a reason to believe. And so we needed messaging that said fills you up. And then the consumer sees that and they're like, interesting. I'm intrigued. And then they later see it in lower font and a lower position in the messaging hierarchy where their eyes are going to track to, by the time they see fiber, they actually can already associate it with its benefit. And again, their brain never goes to the other thing. And so it is almost like engineering perceptions and to do it right, you have to actually understand the little mental locks that fall in order both on creative and both on words to get the consumer where you want 'em to be.

Peter Crosby:

Yeah, I always think of it as Hansel and Gretel without the death, you're just doing one little crumb at a time and you just need to get them to the next crumb

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

S and Gretel without the death. I like it. I like it.

Michael Keplinger:

Ironic thing is I'm explaining these, you guys, these are really easy for you to understand. They almost seem obvious after I explain them, but for some reason they're not obvious in the process because they're so many pieces all that come together all at once. And it's really hard, again, objectivity, it's hard to get it on the pieces that are actually doing the work, so to speak.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

I was just going to say, Michael, would you say that there's specific categories to think about from a packaging perspective, like I herd design, so I think color, font, imagery, and then words. So typography, the text, the claims, and then I'm assuming there's also an element of ingredients. Are there specific buckets that you can say broadly as a brand, think about these things in the context of how the consumer is reacting to them?

Michael Keplinger:

So at the end of the day, again, consumers, they want the easy road. So if you can make their job, and so if you're going to interrupt their behavior, their normal shopping behavior, and this applies more, so there's a degree of how much I'm engaged in the decision making process. A car, very high applesauce, very low. So you've got degrees across there in between. So understand your consumer, how engaged are they in the process? You have some advantages, it's expensive, but e-commerce driven them into a funnel. You've got a little bit more captive audience. So think about that. The next thing is again, contextualize everything. Going back to where I started, okay, do I have a lot of consumers in the grocery store? Do I have a few or an e-commerce? I've actually put them in there and they're on my landing page and there's no other consumers.

Michael Keplinger:

So those are important things because what you're asking them to do is, if I have a go-to product and I have a yogurt and I always buy the same yogurt and you've got this new fancy yogurt, I need to actually grab their attention. So that's where we start thinking about distinctive assets standing out on shelf. They're not exactly the same, but they should be related. Color is a really hard thing to own. Brands change it, but you can use color and blocking. So what we're looking for, I think brands should really think about a design system. So creatively, if I'm in one part of a store, I'm on e-commerce, and then I later go into Target and the same brand is there that there's a mental connection consumers. So we think about these things that are very ownable, like Frosted Flakes, the Tigers pretty ownable.

Michael Keplinger:

Not everybody can have a character on their thing or should they, but there's a lot of distinctive things. And so you want to grab that attention on the shelf. You want to stand out and then you want to need to communicate your value very, very quickly. For example, I think it's perfect teeing up as I was just talking about that healthy snack. So the category is healthy snack, but then when we got to the next step of differentiation, sorry, they actually had the wrong message on there. It didn't hit it. So you've got to be very deliberate about communicating quickly. And so messaging hierarchy, we think about that. I think there's a lot of analogies to even selling online, e-commerce, getting those kind of steps. And so I think messaging is less is more. And I think Thomas Jefferson famous for saying, I would've written you a shorter letter if I had more time.

Michael Keplinger:

It's worthwhile exercise to try to distill less. Less is more because it forces you to be very, very articulate about what really matters and what's working. And it also declutters the pack and things resonate more and it kind of adds a lot of these kind of second order effects like, oh, it just feels like a more premium product because they're able to get it done without screaming at me. Kind of over exaggerating. But I think these are some of the areas that, and I think e-commerce in general is at more risk for this because they have those other drivers to pull. It's kind of like they can be a little lazy with their packaging and it usually will be quite beneficial even if they don't change channels to go revisit it and tighten these things up and get that value proposition and presentation of the product.

Michael Keplinger:

Really, really good. E-commerce a voice, but they shouldn't have the sale because they are so focused on targeting. And your packaging is the one piece that has to speak to all audiences. And you're always going to have your core audience, but you have a lot of audiences. And so you have to have, it's a very strategic function. It's actually closer, in my opinion, to product development than it is to marketing because it is the representation of your product and you get it right and you kind of can't change it very often. So if you have brand managers, they are the key stakeholders for sure. They're the ones that whose job it is in that function is to bring the pieces together and understand and manage that brand. They're usually a bit more insight driven. And so that lends itself to getting it right instead of trying to have special interests. What's going to sell my product better in this particular campaign I'm focused on.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

So Michael, how do you measure the value of different types of packaging versus another when you're launching?

Michael Keplinger:

Sure. So I know I've been talking a lot about some of the other testing methodology we use. Those are very much geared towards learning and then actually taking those learnings and applying them to new creative. But the process at the end is really demonstrating and showing that it's actually going to work on the retail shelf. And so the way that we do it is we kind of culminate this process with the purchase intent test and we try to bring the experience as close as possible to kind of simulating how a consumer is going to shop at the shelf. So we walk in, we kind of contextualize it with some imagery, maybe it's a grocery store or something and you have the shelf and we're going to take, you got any brand manager and any process of a repackage should never go to market if it's actually not going to improve what it's supposed to do, which increase lift.

Michael Keplinger:

And so we're going to bring the existing packaging into the testing and we're using that and essentially building our baseline in the test. And then we have usually in our case maybe three optimized packagings that anyone would be happy bringing those to market. And we bring 'em this test. So we rotate the shelf and drop what's grabbing attention best. And then we kind of narrow our choices down, this is how we shop. And you've got three products, they're price size, just like we shop as consumers and you've got two target competing products and say four concepts, your existing and these three new things. And we're measuring the selection, the percent selection in that set against, so that pi, the purchase intent, the selection of that thing and looking at where we started, that's the baseline of our what, what's in market today and looking for lift across these concepts. And that final thing is really usually, and there's actually, if you go on the Smash run website and our workpage, we have actually have a chart of this, of several different product categories and they move around and we're usually going through this process, but there is something that is doing really, really well. And that almost always becomes our recommendation to go to market.

Peter Crosby:

When you're getting those, have you formed, and I suppose it differs from case to case, but I'm just wondering if coming out of what you've learned from doing all these measurements for all these clients, are there sort of a few takeaways that you've learned that the new packaging look out for or best practices that have out of the multiple measurements that you've done over the past several years?

Michael Keplinger:

There's a lot of little nuances, I'll tell you. And sometimes a lot of times actually something that's not working and it could be failing miserably, it can actually be a little thing. And as I was talking about the gut and the health that could be, or even the laundry detergent, it's conceptually not getting it. Another thing that we actually test for and look for, you can have all your messaging, it actually can resonate really well and it's just you're trying to do too much and it's busy and there's actually, it's a det. It's like pulling away from the performance of the packaging because it's too cluttered, it's too busy and it's doing too much. I think that actually is probably one of the, maybe the least thought about, but maybe one of the most impactful things to kind of keep an eye on of trying to do too much on your packaging is back. What I was saying is less is more.

Peter Crosby:

Yeah, it is the hardest thing. And I go back to you talking about the three seconds you have. If there's too much on there, your three seconds are actually wasted. I can't figure out where to look, can't figure out what's important. And that hierarchy you spoke of sounds super important.

Michael Keplinger:

And I think maybe one other thing too is usually, again, the context of it, people show up, they got an idea of what these things mean and so they're looking for a quick little like, oh, this is better. I think sometimes it surprises us that it's actually so simple. It's such a simple thing. And so the magic is finding it and then when you find it, it's super effective. It's hard to find sometimes, but at the end of the day, it's not like I did 20 things and now look at this. You're like, oh my God, I just changed this one thing. It was a huge unlock and you can have a significant increase in performance by just trying to figure that out.

Peter Crosby:

Well Michael, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and help us revisit really what is a core generator of success for products both online and in store. And hearing about the process in detail and how you guys go through it has really been helpful. We appreciate it.

Michael Keplinger:

Thanks Peter. Thanks Lauren.

Peter Crosby:

Thanks again to Michael for packaging up the new approaches for upping your packaging game. Swing on over to digitalshelfinstitute.org to become a member and keep up on all the latest. Thanks for being part of our community.