Challenge
Discover the best-in-class packaging design and materials innovation to support a future refresh of pack materials for Blackmores, the Australian vitamins and minerals business.
Solution
Blackmores is a well established vitamins & minerals business across Australia and Asia, and was looking to update their pack designs to modernise and address a number of well-known pain points. I helped plan a program of research that looked across Australia, China, South Korea, Europe and the USA to identify best-in-class packaging design and materials innovation, culminating in a detailed scoring and case study report that the business could use to support a subsequent design refresh.
Pulling together a point-of-view with desk research into the state of packaging in the markets, we then interviewed 20 stakeholders from across the Blackmores business to understand the role of packaging across the different business lines - and then correlated this with a series of global packaging expert interviews to talk to future developments in the packaging design space.
Insights from these groups were taken into a co-creation session with client stakeholders, at which we refined a series of scoring research dimensions - which we would then use to evaluate each product pack that we looked at. This approach gave us breadth across user-centric dimensions like ‘convenenience’ and ‘usability ‘, as well as dimensions focused squarely on sustainability and how effectively the pack told the brand’s story.
With the research dimensions agreed, we then began the fieldwork proper. Using teams across Australia, Korea and China (plus some wildcard packaging from the USA and Europe), we created a long list of over 200 brands that we wished to audit. These were taken in to a working session, where the list was refined down to about 30 examples per territory.
All products were purchased, and then evaluated against our framework by local teams on the ground in each market. Scoring could then be aggregated and normalised across markets to understand which were most successful or interesting for us against our dimensions. Global examples were not evaluated in the same way because we were not able to access the physical product,
Each case study then broke out the product’s scoring, highlighted why this particular product was interesting, and used candid unboxing imagery to show how the product was experienced on first use.
OUTCOME
The report was presented to all senior stakeholders, and used as a north star for guiding subsequent packaging. innovations.