On YouTube, views of videos with “unboxing” in the title surpassed 25 billion in 2024,1 and companies have responded to all that interest by creating beautiful unboxing experiences. Yet plenty of untapped potential remains wrapped up in packaging, especially for organizations that look beyond those few moments and strive to generate consumer delight and operational optimization across the entire value chain.
Does your organization look at packaging in siloes through a magnifying glass, or across the value chain with a panoramic lens? Consider the competing and poorly integrated packaging requirements in a typical online cosmetics purchase. The product arrives in a large corrugated box filled with single-use protective dunnage, all headed straight for the recycling bin. Inside, there’s a high-end box that opens beautifully to display the product—and more disposable items, including nonrecyclable materials such as cellophane or foam. Finally, the consumer gets to the product’s primary packaging, a plastic bottle with an ill-fitting, crack-prone lid that serves as a daily reminder of a packaging design fail.
To read the full article, download the PDF here.
