Production ready isn’t market ready

A product launches and doesn’t perform as expected. So something changes. The pack. The claims. The format. The formulation. The price. Then it goes back into market. If performance still doesn’t improve, something changes again.

Manufacturers often experience this cycle particularly clearly. Revised artwork arrives. Specifications change. A different component is introduced. There is another trial, another print run, another production requirement. Each request may be entirely reasonable. But when the same product keeps returning in a different form, there is a question worth asking much earlier: Do we know what problem we’re actually trying to fix?

Manufacturers see the consequences

Manufacturers occupy a revealing position in the product journey. They may not own the brand strategy, consumer proposition or packaging design, but they frequently experience the physical consequences of decisions made elsewhere.

A formulation change can affect claims. A claim change can affect hierarchy. Hierarchy affects artwork. A new format can affect components, filling, labelling, packing or logistics etc. Eventually, somebody has to make all those decisions real.

And every iteration carries a cost. New artwork and repro. New components. Samples. Testing. Trials. Approvals. Obsolete stock. Production planning. Print runs. Time from multiple teams across the business and supply chain. Yet if the underlying problem hasn’t been diagnosed, all that activity may simply be another attempt to solve the wrong thing.

Production ready isn’t market ready

Getting a product successfully into production is an achievement. But production readiness validates manufacturability. It doesn’t necessarily validate desirability, differentiation, comprehension or relevance with the consumer.

A product can be remarkably advanced operationally while still carrying the brand owner’s assumptions about why consumers will choose it. And by this stage, those assumptions can start feeling like facts. The proposition has been agreed. The target consumer identified. The USP defined. Claims selected. Pricing established.

But agreement isn’t evidence. Nor is historical knowledge necessarily evidence of what consumers think today. Categories change. Competitors move. Consumer priorities shift. What differentiated a product three years ago may now be category standard. What an internal team considers its strongest advantage may barely register with the people expected to buy it. And surprisingly often, those consumers haven’t even been asked.

Case in point: In early 2009 American juice megabrand, Tropicana, redesigned its Pure Premium carton. Consumers were unhappy with the new look and sales dropped by 20% in less than two months, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in losses while competitors captured their market share. They made a similar mistake 15 years later by replacing their iconic carafe-style bottle with a much more economical generic shape – a decision most likely driven primarily from a financial point of view. Consumers felt short-changed and sales plummeted all over again.

Before another intervention, diagnose

Just Design believes that there is a step missing between recognising that something isn’t working and deciding what to change: diagnosis. Not necessarily months of research or another enormous strategy exercise.

First, establish what is known, what is assumed and where the uncertainty actually sits. For us, that means looking across the product, positioning, category, competitors, consumer, pack and commercial context all together.

Perhaps the positioning is strong but the packaging isn’t communicating it clearly? Perhaps the USP is no longer distinctive, or the benefit lands perfectly but it isn’t valued enough to drive purchase? Perhaps packaging isn’t the problem at all.

Those are very different problems and the objective isn’t to find a reason to redesign something. It is to identify the intervention most likely to make a difference before everybody invests in making it real.

Why a packaging specialist has a useful view of the problem

Packaging gives one an unusual vantage point across the route to market because almost every significant product decision eventually manifests there: positioning affects communication and substrate, formulation affects claims, range strategy influences architecture etc. On the manufacturing side, capability can constrain structure, and format and logistics can influence material and size. Retail requirements come into play as well, but ultimately, consumer behaviour determines whether any of it works.

And those relationships travel in both directions. Change the pack and the consequences can travel back through production, cost, logistics and the wider commercial model.

So understanding packaging properly means understanding far more than what happens on the artwork. This understanding is pivotal to how we work. Without that wider view, we could easily become part of the same cycle: receive the brief, redesign the pack, launch it, watch it underperform and redesigning it again without ever establishing whether design was the right intervention in the first place.

Design Intelligence is how we try to avoid that. It means understanding the route-to-market journey well enough to recognise what affects what. Looking backwards at the assumptions behind the brief, outwards at the category and consumer, and forwards at what a design decision may set in motion through manufacturing and route to market.

Not because we claim expertise in every discipline involved. Because good packaging decisions depend on knowing when those disciplines matter.

Diagnosis is cheaper than repeated intervention

Repeated change isn’t only a design cost. Every new intervention can ripple through every deliverable and service in the process. Then the revised product returns to market. If the change was based on another untested assumption, the business may simply have thrown even more money at another iteration of the same problem.

The larger cost is the one nobody sees. Nielsen’s analysis of European FMCG launches found that roughly three in four fail within a year. Some deserve to. But how many genuinely good products have been delisted because the business ran out of money or patience before it understood why their potential wasn’t translating into sales? We may never know. And it is a compelling reason to diagnose before intervening again.

Manufacturers see what happens when decisions made elsewhere eventually become physical. As packaging specialists, we see many of those same decisions converge on pack. That gives us a shared interest in getting more of them right before another costly round of change begins.

Production ready is important. But before the next production run, it’s worth making sure the product is market ready too.