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Creating a Sales-building A-bomb

Do pizza company leaders view their pizza box as a Marketing Weapon?

Most would reply, “YES.”

In fact, however, most of them do NOT view it that way. You know this by where the locus of packaging control lies within the organization. In most pizza chains this turns out to be the purchasing department. Purchasing is the primary controller and decision-maker (sometimes the only decision-maker) in packaging development. A group sometimes having secondary input, usually in an advisory capacity, is the R&D department. And last in order is the marketing department — which, if it has any involvement at all, usually consists of deciding where to position a couple boiler-plate graphics on the carton.

Interestingly, in all other forms of retail enterprise the situation is just the opposite. Marketing initiates, drives, and controls packaging development. Once a total concept is brought to fruition by the marketing department it's handed off to the R&D folks for QC testing. When this is completed it's finally given to the purchasing department for vendor selection and price negotiation.

FACT IS, most pizza companies ignore packaging as a tool for achieving competitive advantage and marketing goals! Instead they view their pizza box as merely a carrying vessel. That being the case, the driving factor behind packaging development is cost reduction. Which is why, in the pizza industry, the locus of packaging development resides in purchasing rather than in marketing. (For more on the cost side of packaging, see Cost Reduction.)

However, we suggest that there's a more profitable perspective. We believe that by viewing packaging as a marketing weapon rather than as a carrying vessel — as a revenue-generator rather than as a cost-producer — a company will greatly enhance its bottom line.

Here's why ... and HOW to do it.

1. The Two Dimensions of Packaging. When most pizza executives think of packaging, graphics — also known as decoration — is what comes to mind. However, packaging actually consists of two dimensions: GRAPHICS and STRUCTURE. Structure is the architecture of a box, graphics is the paint job. Most pizza companies tend to ignore structure as a player in package design and marketing strategy. However, a high-impact box combines optimal graphics with optimal structure. To derive maximum marketing impact from a pizza box, we must view it as a synergistic combination of both dimensions. Viewing a corrugated pizza box as merely “cardboard with printing” shackles our ability to maximize packaging's effectiveness as a marketing tool. For an illustration of how a minor structural alteration can produce a major change in a carton's image and impact, click here.

2. Pre-purchase and Post-purchase Impact. When most folks think of packaging's impact, they think of what they encounter as they roam a supermarket or department store. This is pre-purchase impact. It's the most common form of packaging impact. There is, however, another form of packaging interaction: Post-purchase impact. It occurs after the purchase and, typically, in the consumer's home. A pizza box is different from most other forms of packaging in that its impact is almost entirely post-purchase. To optimize pizza packaging as a marketing weapon, we must bear in mind this distinction — and design our packaging to achieve maximum POST-purchase impact. This requires innovative use of both graphics and structure, because it's impossible to achieve maximum impact from your box when that box creates a virtually identical post-purchase impact as the boxes of all your competitors.

3. The Post-purchase Bonanza. When it comes to consumer impact opportunity your pizza box stands alone. Amazingly, except for the actual pizza, your pizza box is the vehicle of greatest exposure and consumer interaction in your business! That's because (a) the box has the highest frequency of customer contact of any element in your business (excluding the pizza, of course) and (b) it has the longest duration of customer contact of any element in the business. Here's why that is.

CUSTOMER CONTACT FREQUENCY. For each delivery/carry-out pizza sold, an average of 2.5 persons have contact with the box. So the pizza box of a pizza store that sells 50,000 pizzas annually has 125,000 customer contacts per year (50,000 X 2.5). Similarly, for a company that sells, say, 100 million pizzas annually, its pizza box has 250 million customer contacts per year. No other element in your business — except for the pizza — has that level of customer contact frequency! This is truly amazing, when you think about it.

CUSTOMER CONTACT DURATION. With each purchase a typical consumer spends at least 10 minutes viewing and interacting with your box! (About 20 percent of them even save the box for another 12 hours in the refrigerator.) In that period the customer views it, reads it, feels it, transports it, and operationally interacts with it. In all this s/he spends more time exposed to your box than to all of your company's other marketing factors combined! Yes, believe or not, the typical consumer spends more time viewing and interacting with your pizza box than with all of your advertising, signage, building, and service staff put together. This is really incredible.

So what's the result of these two factors combined? For a pizza store that sells 50,000 pizzas annually, its box garners a whopping 1,250,000 minutes, or 20,833 hours, of customer contact time per year! (50,000 pizzas x 2.5 persons per pizza x 10 minutes per person = 1,250,000 contact minutes). This makes your pizza box the most potentially powerful impression-shaping tool in your marketing arsenal. Nothing else even comes close.

And the mind-blower of it all is: All this customer contact time is FREE! Unlike with advertising and other marketing factors, a pizza business doesn't pay a single extra cent to generate this exposure time. So not only is your pizza box the most potentially powerful impression-shaping tool in your marketing arsenal, it's also the most cost-effective.

4. Brand-building. “Brand” and “branding” are hot buzzwords today. Everyone's talking about brand-this and brand-that. All this mumbo-jumbo has infused these words with mystery. In reality, however, brand-building is a straight-forward, easily understood process that's based on a simple definition of terms.

Simply put, a brand is a distinctive name identifying a product or company, or both. It's nothing more than that (check your dictionary if you like). Branding, then, is a two-part process comprising (a) coming up with a distinctive name for attaching to a particular product (or company) and then (b) getting consumers to associate that distinctive name with the product. That's brand-building in a nutshell.

And how do we get people to associate the distinctive name with our product? We formulate the name into an eye-catching, memorable logo and then we attach the logo to the product on every conceivable occasion. Simple as that.

And, as we might suspect, the most powerful vehicle for associating a name with a product is the product's package!

In the April 2005 issue of Package Design magazine, writer Rich Thibault imparts this valuable insight in his article titled “Designing Iconic Packaging: Packaging That Is Instantly Recognizable As Tied to the Brand It Supports:”

“Consumer product marketers strive to establish bonds with their intended audiences by creating a brand personality or image that is immediately identified and ultimately pulls the consumer towards it. This is especially critical for premium brands where a well-executed image is key to the brand's success. In these cases, packaging is called upon to do more than just support a product positioning. A truly successful packaging execution evokes an emotional response from consumers; it creates a distinct visual impression that is instantly identifiable to the brand. Packaging that is tied to the brand through the successful use of materials, structural, and graphic design is what we refer to as 'Iconic Packaging.'”

How does Thibault's iconic packaging concept apply to pizza packaging? The traditional means by which a logo has been attached to a package is by graphics. However, for ultimate impact it can also be done through structure. When this occurs, we have what Thibault might call an “Iconic Pizza Box.” And the brand-building effect can be dramatic. For examples, see GSI Photo Collage and GSI: Pizza Chain Brand-builder. Iconic packaging can be applied to Pizza Hut, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, Little Caesars ... and to virtually any other major chain.

5. Differentiation-building. Along with brand-building, marketing authorities tell us that to achieve preeminence in a competitive arena a company must create and communicate a point of difference.

To explain how to do this we go to differentiation guru Jack Trout. In his book Differentiate or Die, Trout spells out a 4-step process for differentiating a company or product. In summary form, the process is this.

FIRST, analyze your company or product in relation to the competition and its products. Figure out what it is about your company and product that's different from that of the competition. We call this a point of difference.

SECOND, formulate that difference into a concise, memorable statement — the fewer words, the better. The statement should identify, or at least imply, a compelling consumer benefit that your company provides and which your competition does not. We call this a differentiation statement.

THIRD, dig out, create, or somehow identify some sort of logical or factual proof for your differentiation statement. A statement without proof is dead. The stronger the proof, the more believable your differentiation statement is. And the more believable it is, the greater its impact in generating consumer awareness and sales.

FOURTH, communicate your differentiation statement at every opportunity and every way possible. Trout says it best, “Every aspect of your communications should reflect your difference. The bottom line is: You can't overcommunicate your difference.”

We sum up Trout's 4-step differentiation process in a sentence: Discover it, define it, prove it, proclaim it. The “it,” of course, being that thing which makes your company different from — and, therefore, presumably better than — your competitors. (For further delving into this intriguing topic, visit Re-discovering Differentiation in the Correll Comment section of this website.)

So how does packaging pertain to differentiation? Simple — we display our differentiation statement on our packaging. By seeing the statement while experiencing the product, the consumer's experience validates the statement (assuming, of course, that the consumer's experience is positive). This relates to Trout's fourth step.

However, in certain instances we can use packaging for more than just proclaiming a point of difference. A pizza company can — under certain conditions — also use it for proving its point of difference (Trout's third step). When this is done the impact can be dramatic. This requires going beyond the use of graphics and into the realm of packaging structure. (For an illustration, see PCE: Hot Feature of the Future.)

6. Impression-building. Closely associated with brand-building and differentiation is impression-building (a.k.a. image-building). In brand-building we get consumers to associate our product with a particular name or trademark. In differentiation we define our point of difference and drive it into the consumer psyche. With impression-building we create, through all points of consumer interaction with our company, a particular overall positive impression that we want consumers to have of our enterprise. The purpose of generating this particular positive impression is to create a certain positive feeling or predisposition within consumers when they see or hear our name. In effect, impression-building is the process of attaching positive feelings to our brand ... or, you could say, the process of "emotionalizing" our brand in the minds of consumers.

How can packaging be put to work in impression-building? First, we can apply box graphics that reinforce the impression we want to create. Second, we can use a box structure that also creates that impression. Some pizza companies give thought to impression-building graphics. Very few give thought to impression-building structure. (See Groundbreaking Little Ad for an interesting analysis of structure's impact on customer impression.) To re-visit the illustration of how box structure can impact box impression, click here.

Further, pizza company executives tend to assume that the traditional pizza box conveys a 100 percent positive impression. In fact this is incorrect. The traditional box projects a number of negative impressions. It just so happens that we've been living with this downside for so long that most pizzeria operators have become blind to it. (See Downside of the Traditional Box for details.)

When evaluating the impression projected by a particular box, we should do the evaluation in the post-purchase format — or, in other words, after the box has held a hot pizza for 20 minutes and been transported in a delivery vehicle. The result can be quite different from that perceived when viewing a dry, empty box in an office.

7. Quality-building. We measure quality in two dimensions: (1) as customer perceptions and (2) as product characteristics. Ultimately, perception is all that matters. We should view the second dimension merely as a way to achieving desired results in the first.

Interestingly, packaging plays an important role in both dimensions. Nearly three-quarters of a century of scientific research demonstrates packaging's dramatic impact on shaping consumers' perception of the product contained within a package. (See How It's MORE Than Just a Box!.)

In addition, pizza packaging plays a major role in shaping the physical characteristics of the delivered product. Temperature, cut, texture, physical appearance — all can be impacted by the package. For one example of how appearance can be affected by the type of carton used, click here. For further information on how box structure can impact product quality, see The Operations Issues and the PCE section.

8. Promotion-building. For decades pizzeria operators have affixed advertising pieces, or boxtoppers, to their pizza boxes, thereby turning the box into a promotion-building vehicle. However, little thought has been given to the image-degradation that occurs. What the customer receives — in most instances — is a box with a soggy, wrinkled, crookedly-positioned piece of paper glued on top of a company logo, thereby desecrating the logo. In removing the paper it gets torn, and remaining on the box is an ugly little glue spot with a curled paper strip attached. What impression does this create? Proud, caring, quality? Probably not.

To overcome this problem, one strategy is to create box graphics designed to integrate with a particular-size boxtopper, so that it appears that the boxtopper “fits” the pizza box. For optimal impact, attach the boxtopper with removable glue or tape and position it with care. Another strategy is to use a boxcard instead of a boxtopper. A boxcard is a business-card size piece containing a promo offer. Instead of gluing it to the cover, it's slipped between the side panels of the box. When the customer opens the box the card flips out onto the table. This keeps the box cover “clean and shining.”

There are, of course, numerous other ways of promoting via a pizza box. Our message here is: Design the communication medium to fit the box (or vice versa), taking into consideration all elements impacting the consumer, including the impression created by the box.

9. Consumer Feedback. Most pizza boxes go out with an order slip attached. The slip contains unique customer info. This makes customer info a component of the pizza package (a factor unique in retail packaging). It also makes each pizza box unique to each consumer. This situation opens the door to using a pizza box as a triggering mechanism for getting timely customer-specific feedback. Combined with point-of-sale computer technology and/or the internet, many things are possible. This, of course, goes to an area outside the scope of this discussion. We mention it here because in the near future pizza packaging will likely be designed to facilitate this unique opportunity.

TO SUM UP — Contrary to how many pizza company executives view it, the pizza box is one of the most (potentially) powerful, cost-effective marketing weapons in a pizza company's competitive arsenal — capable of playing a strong supporting role in numerous marketing strategies. It is, indeed, the Untapped Profit-builder!

Now that we've described how your pizza packaging can be put to work building sales and public perception, see Superior Side-item Packaging for even more sales-building ideas.

If you're interested in exploring how your company could enhance its pizza box to achieve sales-building effectiveness that's even greater than what you already have, contact John Correll - 734-455-5830 or email john@correllconcepts.com. We likely can help you do this at no additional packaging cost to your company ... in other words, free of charge. Please note — Correll Concepts is a packaging design specialist, not a box manufacturer.