Happy New Year to all Reseller News readers - in fact, to readers in general. It's an appropriate time of the year to be thinking about packaging, after all that unwrapping during the cash and credit onslaught that Christmas has become. It's a time customarily accompanied by piles of waste cardboard and wrapping paper, and this time the problem seems to have worsened.
Children’s toys in particular - presumably in a vain attempt to make them look better in retail displays - are so overpackaged as to make them barely removable from their boxes.
Wired, shrink- and blister-packaging to the point of absurdity, I half expected some gifts to contain a caution: WARNING! THIS PRODUCT IS NOT DESIGNED TO BE REMOVED FROM ITS PACKAGING.
A single toasted sandwich I bought recently from one Auckland coffee bar came wrapped in two plastic boxes (it wouldn’t fit into one, I was told apologetically), along with two paper plates, two plastic napkins and two brown paper bags. Perhaps the idea was that by the time I'd unwrapped it I'd have forgotten what was in there. "A sandwich! How thoughtful! Just what I've always wanted...", etc.
Back in Reseller News world, software vendors that continue to sell a physical product are, of course, equally guilty. Microsoft Office 2007 comes packaged in a large, unyielding clear plastic box similar to the kind that used to contain deluxe ‘Director’s Cut’ video releases. It folds out melodramatically to reveal just two holographed DVDs, a small booklet and about an acre of wasted plastic packaging. Once installed, where am I expected to store it? A CD rack won't accommodate it and bookshelf real estate is too precious for software.
At a time when more and more software is being delivered as a service, most of this packaging is ridiculous and wasteful - not to mention difficult for customers to open and use.
Australian PR companies are well-known for couriering gifts (most often, broken chocolates and Aussie wines) across the ditch. No wonder so many IT companies are currently laying off staff and cutting costs; they’ve bust their budgets on courier fees and bubble-wrapped booze. Spare a thought for the environment, folks. We have wine in NZ, too, you know.
There’s a website devoted to overpackaging, www.overpackaging.com (although it doesn’t appear to have been updated for a while and is a little short on content). It points to the folly of companies such as Amazon that use recycled cardboard to mail goods to customers but unfortunately almost always use boxes far larger than necessary to package whatever is inside them.
Apple products generally come beautifully packaged - when I borrowed an Air notebook for review last year, it arrived wrapped up like a Japanese birthday gift - but although it’s always elegantly done, not as much thought has been expended on the potential waste.But it isn’t only physical packaging. The kind of ‘packaging’ that wraps up companies’ marketing messages is frequently wasteful, too.
Before Christmas, one software company had its PR firm deliver a largely superfluous message in two emails - a kind of ‘before and after’ pretence - and it had my already strained inbox groaning. Graphics-intensive emails didn’t impress editors and journalists 10 years ago and do so even less today. ‘Communicators’ still send them to us, in the mistaken belief that they need some kind of gimmick to tell a story that probably wasn’t worth telling in the first place.
To what extent do you think about the packaging that goes around the products you sell? Do you think it’s important? Would you say the way in which goods are packaged reflects on the public image of your brand? And if you have any examples of overpackaging of your own - particularly if they are IT products - I’d be very interested to hear from you.
