Packaging Professionally
By Tom Boyles | PMQ Staff

I’ve always said that you can sell anything if you package it right…even rocks. I can even prove it. Some of you older blokes may remember this. There was a rather ingenious guy back in the 1970s who made millions selling ordinary rocks. The trick was his packaging. He simply glued two eyes on a rock and put them in some creative packaging and sold them as a novelty toy…Pet Rocks. But now we’re not selling rocks…well, I have had a few pizzas that did taste worse than dirt, but for the sake of moving on, we are in the business of selling food. Can you packaging help you sell more? Sure. Can choosing the right packaging save you money? Absolutely. Can the wrong packaging decision cause you to lose business? No doubt. Pizza shop owners should view their pizza box and other packaging as a marketing weapon to begin with, but most simply think of it as a container for takeaway. Let’s learn a bit more about packaging.

George Braoudakis, director at XMG/Coup-on-a- Box (tel: 61 3 9846 6555, mob: 0402 085 860, www. couponabox.com.au) says the biggest mistake he sees in packaging is buying based on price alone. “I suggest that you look at five things when it comes to packaging,” George says. “Number 1: If it’s an Australian product, 2: Quality, 3: Size, 4: Reliablity and consistent service, and 5: Has the box/package got any added value for your customers (eg. coupons).”

“Most pizza companies ignore packaging as a tool and, instead, view it as merely a carrying vessel,” said John Correll, packaging expert and owner of Correll Concepts. “That being the case, the driving factor behind packaging development is cost reduction. In the pizza industry, the locus of packaging development resides in purchasing rather than in marketing. I believe that by viewing packaging as a marketing weapon rather than as a carrying vessel a company will greatly enhance its bottom line.”

Marketing
John says that, except for the actual pizza, your pizza packaging is the vehicle of greatest exposure and consumer interaction in your business! The reasons he lists are: (a) the packaging has the highest frequency of customer contact of any element in your business and (b) it has the longest duration of customer contact of any element in the business. He says that:
• Customer Contact Frequency: For each delivery/ carry-out pizza sold, an average of 2.5 persons have contact with the box. So a pizza store that sells 50,000 pizzas annually has 125,000 customer contacts per year with the box (50,000 X 2.5).
• Customer Contact Duration: With each purchase, a typical consumer spends at least 10 minutes viewing and interacting with your packaging! (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. 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.

“So what’s the result of these two factors combined?” John asks. “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. Nothing else even comes close.”

George points out another facet to packaging in that with all of these exposures, you have the perfect opportunity to display your coupons and/or advertising on the box. You can contact a company like Coup-on-a-Box (www.couponabox.com.au) or use your menus. Simply take a bit of hot glue and attach your menus and this will serve as a great vehicle to distribute specials or takeaway menus, web sites, phone numbers, function rooms, or any other info you need to get out, such as VIP clubs.

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