Early in its rise to iconic brand status, Apple nailed a seemingly inconsequential detail: packaging. For a long time, businesses in general focused on the front end of a business relationship: Drive awareness for your product, convince people to buy that product, and then get that product in the consumer’s hands. Today—because of the work of brands like Apple—marketers and business owners realize that the full cycle of the relationship matters. Painstaking attention to the most minute details of things like onboarding and, yes, packaging.
To give you an idea of how much attention, research, and testing goes into the box for a product, the book Inside Apple recounts the story of how a designer spent months testing the size and colors of pull-tabs for the iPod box, even going as far as to design the box itself in such a way that “the tabs were placed so that when Apple’s factory packed multiple boxes for shipping to retail stores, there was a natural negative space between the boxes that protected and preserved the tab.”
Details that small matter.
Visit the Synersteel blog to read the full post on the power of great packaging.