If you’ve never devoted much thought to tissue boxes, you’re probably not alone. But it might be about time that you start. Kleenex, as one would expect, certainly has been thinking long and hard about how to package its products. Unlike many–most, even–consumer products, the packaging of tissues remains on display as long as there is one tissue left in the box. If you walk into my bathroom or bedroom, you’ll see a box of tissues. I’m not one of those people that covers the box with a plastic shield. As Andrew Adam Newman puts it in the headline of his recent New York Times article about the company’s packaging choices, With Kleenex, the package is part of the product.
All tissue makers are faced with a seasonal conundrum: how sales can be maintained during the summer. According to Newman, tissue sales can drop by as much as 60% in the summer months, compared to a high point in January. Now, without going so far as to encourage the flu and other tissue-heavy illnesses, Kleenex has a plan in place to make consumers feel more at home with its products, even during the summer. Here’s Newman:
Now Kleenex, the brand that invented facial tissues 86 years ago, is hoping to bolster summer sales with packages that resemble wedges of fruit and look more at home on a picnic table than a bedside table. The A-frame packages, featuring fruits like watermelon, orange and lime, were available only at Target last summer, and are being sold at all major retailers this summer.
“This keeps the category relevant during this time of year,” said Craig Smith, brand director of Kleenex, a Kimberly-Clark brand. Mr. Smith said that with the fruit packaging test run last summer, “we saw close to 100 percent incrementality,” meaning sales of the novelty box did not cannibalize sales of standard Kleenex boxes.
Consumers who blow their nose less often–for example, during the summer–most likely won’t run through as many tissues as they do during the winter, no matter how Kleenex packages them. But a 60% seasonal drop off is a problem begging for a solution. If Kleenex can close that gap, even a little, this process must be considered a success. Changing the packaging to something more closely associated with the summer months is an easy way for Kleenex to try to salvage some of this lost revenue. It’s a creative move which has the added benefit of proving low risk, high reward. All from changing the box.
How can simple differences change the way that customers think of your product? What is your packaging really communicating?
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